Js the life of Man 
Eternal ? 

Blades. 




Class 
Book 



i*r\ 



Copyright}) . 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT: 






Is the Life of Man Eternal? 



"So when this corruption shall have put on incorrup- 
tion and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then 
shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death 
is swallowed up in victory. O, Death where is thy sting. 
O, Grave where is thy victory." — The Greatest of the 
Apostles. 

By FRANKLIN BLADES, M.D. 

Rush Medical College 
Formerly a Judge of the Circuit Court of Illinois 




Cochrane Publishing Company 

Tribune Building 

New York 

1911 



3>u 



Copyright, 1911, by 
Cochrane Publishing Co. 



N, 



^ 



©CU286368 



Affectionately inscribed 

to the friend of many years 

ISAAC NEWTON PHILLIPS 

The accomplished lawyer 

and gentleman 

Lately and long the able and efficient 

Reporter of the Superior 

Court of Illinois 



CONTENTS 

Introductory Note 5 

Prefatory 9 

Antiquity of Belief in a Future Life 15 

Age of Scepticism — Causes of Waning Faith 19 

Decline of Religion and Consequent Moral Dis- 
aster 25 

What Negationists Would Give Us 33 

Soul Personality 37 

Further Consideration of Soul Personality 40 

Evolution and the Soul 49 

Ideational Processes — "Unconscious Cerebration" 62 

Unconscious Cerebration 65 

Memory — Brightest as the Physical Fails 71 

Memory of Association — Recognition 77 

Freedom of the Will— Fatalism 81 

Is Immortality a Dead Issue? 92 

The Differentiating Moral and Intellectual Fac- 
ulties 95 

The Moral Sense and Immortality 105 

And the Moral Law— What It Means 109 

Charity— Love— Good Will 121 

The Future of Science and Religion 124 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

BY 

GEORGE A. GATES, D.D., LL.D. 
(President of Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn.) 



The future life is not a matter to be treated mechan- 
ically or dogmatically. So supreme an act of faith as the 
belief that there is for us humans a conscious personal 
existence beyond physical death is to most thoughtful 
people, a reverent hope. To treat that hope in the spirit 
of controversy or stark argumentation seems blasphem- 
ous. To pour ridicule or contempt upon those who find 
themselves still doubtful of so great a possibility is 
wicked. "There lives more faith in honest doubt, be- 
lieve me, than in half the creeds." But the word "honest" 
must have the chief emphasis, if the poet's word is to 
be held true. / 

There seem to be those to whom confidence in im- 
mortality is easy. It is not easy for some of the rest of 
us to understand that facility. But as great as is the 
reach of faith to attain and hold belief in the future life, 
the opinion that "death ends all" involves still greater 



6 INTRODUCTORY NOTE 

difficulties. Nature abounds, indeed, in what seem to be 
wastes, but not in such wastes as universal death would 
be. So much of the best in human life, and thought, 
and spirit, and high endeavor, would seem to bear the 
mark of ultimate failure, that one shrinks from the 
despair of final death as too illogical. So, put in the 
coldest intellectual manner possible, the larger faith 
holds its place. 

To some the view of the writer of this essay that there 
is no other adequate support for belief that motive and 
conduct can be intrinsically right or wrong, than faith 
in the future life, will seem unsound. To others of us, 
Judge Blades' position seems correct. Ethics is practical 
or nothing. And practically, how foolishly, the word 
will largely be : "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we 
die." The sanction of eternal life is none too much for 
the support of the ethical appeal. Even in spite of that 
glorious call, sin holds high and persistent revel and 
works its awful dooms. How immeasurably worse 
would be our human case without the larger hope? 

The easy criticism that this reduces ethics to sheer 
commercialism is not valid. Spiritual rewards are not 
cheap payments of "happiness" (one of the weakest 
words in the language) or "glory." In the realm of 
spirit, rewards are in kind. That is : the reward of virtue 
is more virtue; of character, higher character: good 
deeds, opportunity to do more of them. 

"The wages of Sin is death; if the wages of Virtue be dust, 
Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and 

the fly? 
She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just, 
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky: 
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die." 

But the Great Hope strikes its main root deeper than 



INTRODUCTORY NOTE 7 

the Stratum of ethics. It lays hold on the foundations of 
spirit. Moreover its mysteries present no greater diffi- 
culties than the daily wonders of the Universe involved 
in the modern conceptions of All that Is. 

Our author has brought to his treatment of this great 
theme the reverent study of mature life and thought. It 
is worthy. It should be largely helpful. 

George A. Gates. 



PREFATORY 

The theme of immortality, old as humanity, is yet ever 
new — new as the generations come and go. The theme 
is perennial as man — the race. What with the Higher 
Criticism and the revelations of modern Science, vener- 
able theological dogmas, and mere gross dogmatic materi- 
alism are being discredited, but the nobler faith and hope 
survive, and lift the spirit of man above the grosser things 
of time and sense. 

While not much that is new can be advanced affirma- 
tively in support of faith in the future life, in the atti- 
tude of scientific negationists, and the point of view from 
which they discuss the question, there is much that is 
new. So that to the extent that support of the doctrine 
of immortality consists in the refutation of these new 
positions of scientists, the arguments for immortality 
may be said to be new. 

The higher ground and more strongly intrenched posi- 
tion of physiological materialism, which has to a large 
extent taken the place of other forms of materialism 
under various guise, has rendered less effective, indeed 
obsolete, the weapons of attack of vulgar dogmatic 
materialism. 

If at present there is reason to believe that, in effect, 
Higher Criticism, and the doctrine of evolution are con- 
tributing not only to loss of faith in what is purported 
to be Divine Revelation, but to subversion of faith in 
the immortality of the soul, there are, on the other hand, 



10 PREFATORY 

those who believe that the lost ground will be more than 
recovered by the new, and advanced, and more reasonable 
position being taken in eliminating antiquated dogmas 
and superstitions which not only are not essential to New 
Testament religion, but have been its clog and curse ever 
since the apostolic time; and that aside from the rein- 
forcement which may be brought to the faith of Christian 
believers in immortality, something is to be gained by 
taking up the challenge of the predominant modern 
school of materialists that mind is purely a chemico- 
physiological function, and refuting them on their own 
ground. 

When the writer set out to crystalize his thoughts upon 
this subject he felt so confident that the moral sense — 
the moral attribute of the mind — is a postulate upon 
which might be predicated what could be mo§t forcibly 
said in support of faith in immortality, that it was a 
disappointment to find that generally ethical writers 
seemed to regard the subject as if the main, if not the 
only concern of the moral life, is with matters of secular 
interest, and as if the relation of the moral sense to the 
future life, was an incident of secondary importance. 
However, it may with much force be contended, that 
the science of morals, if it may be termed a science, 
peforms an important office in the secular field of utility, 
since whether mortal or immortal man must "live and 
move and have his being" within the conditions of this 
life. But most thoughtful men must at times be over- 
whelmed with the feeling that they may as well have 
never lived at all (better, indeed, though living man can 
hardly be reconciled to the thought), if this world con- 
tains all of his existence. On reading much of the litera- 
ture which the physical scientists and men of note in 
philosophy have written on the theme of immortality in 



PREFATORY 11 

recent years, the writer is impressed that too little con- 
sideration has been given to this aspect of the question. 

So far as a considerable body of thinking, doubting, 
people are concerned, the questions of the existence of 
God and the immortality of the soul, are not to be met 
and argued, or dogmatically settled, by an appeal to the 
Old and New Testament scriptures. The physical scien- 
tists have undoubtedly exploded the Mosaic, probably 
ante-Mosaic, myth of the creation of the world and of 
man, and of the moon and stars which were regarded 
as the attendants of the earth; and with many not pro- 
foundly reflecting people, this seems to have shaken the 
whole foundation of possible revelation. These doubters 
are too much inclined to believe — perhaps rather, fear — 
that science has had the last and conclusive word against 
the duality of man. 

In every age since the Christian epoch, Christianity has 
been the chief champion of the doctrine of immortality. 
In the Law as inscribed on the Tables of Stone, and in 
all the Pentateuch there is no hint of a life beyond the 
grave. Whatever of faith there exists in the future life 
in the nominally Christian lands, even outside of the 
Christian Church, and even among those who reject 
Christianity, is mainly due to Christ and His disciples. 
But the faith of the Christian peoples has been and is 
based on what is claimed to be Revelation. But now 
Christianity seems to have reached a pause. At any rate, 
after the lapse of nearly two thousand years, not a 
moiety of the adult population of the lands nominally 
Christian, are professedly Christian. The long ages of 
teaching that God is ever present and ever interfering in 
the affairs of man have produced that general state of 
mind which cannot at once receive the new departure 
without a shock to faith in the essentials of the Christian 



12 PREFATORY 

system. In the moral catastrophe which may follow, 
and which some contend has already occurred to a con- 
siderable extent, there are some grounds to fear that 
faith in immortality may be, indeed is, greatly subverted. 

There are wise Christian apologists who do not de- 
spair. They see that the Higher Criticism does not 
affect the fundamentals of the Christian system, and that 
the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution is consistent 
with belief that God is immanent by universal knowl- 
edge and power, in all nature, and that he creates and 
rules by universal cosmic law ; that God was the designing 
genesis of the evolutionary process in organic life which 
has attained its highest reach and finality in man; and 
that while evolution has ceased as a physical and psychical 
factor in man — that man is the "finished product," as 
John Fiske puts it — volitional development of his moral 
and intellectual nature has gone on, and will go on in- 
definitely. 

On this ground the doctrine of the future life is unas- 
sailable by physical science. For while it may be true, 
as John Fiske has said, that the "spiritualistic hypothesis 
may, perhaps, be still regarded as on trial," when it 
comes to the moral and intellectual life of man the nega- 
tion scientist can speak with no greater authority than 
the common sceptic. 

To the extent that evolution, in one form or other, 
either Darwinian or mutative, comes generally to be ac- 
cepted as the cause of man's physical being, the con- 
flict between science and religion will probably cease if 
the scientists shall generally become content exclusively 
with their own field of observation and experiment. 
Aside from purported Revelation, which it is not here 
proposed to enlist in this contention as Revelation, the 
grounds for and against belief in immortality are for the 



PREFATORY 13 

most part metaphysical, and so science can claim no ad- 
vantage in argument. The axioms and methods of 
physical science cannot be enlisted on the side of negation 
for they are inept in considering intellectual and moral 
problems. The predominant thought sought to be ex- 
pressed and enforced in this essay is that the moral 
sense in man is the highest and best evidence of the ex- 
istence of soul personality and life beyond the grave. 



Is the Life of Man Eternal? 



ANTIQUITY OF BELIEF IN A FUTURE LIFE 

In that admirable little book "Through Nature to God," 
John Fiske writes : "The belief in the personal continu- 
ance of the individual human soul after death is a very- 
ancient one. The savage custom of burying untensils and 
trinkets for the use of the deceased enables us to trace 
back to the glacial period. We may safely say that for 
much more than a hundred thousand years mankind have 
regarded themselves as personally interested in two 
worlds, the physical world which daily greets our waking 
senses, and another world, comparatively dim and vaguely 
outlined with which the psychical side of humanity is 
more closely connected'' — albeit earliest traditions show 
that their religion was a fetichism, or animism, as it is 
among the lowest tribes to-day, and the realm of spirits 
a region wherein dwelt demons personated in the destruc- 
tive forces of nature, and peopled with the ghosts of 
those who had lived on earth. 

A remarkable, though of itself insignificant as an initia- 
tive event in the moral evolution of man was the emerg- 
ing of Abraham out of the ploytheism and idolatry of 
his native Semitic tribes, and his vigorous faith in one 
invisible God. It is hardly too much to say that his de- 
parture out of the land of his kindred and repudiation 



16 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

of idolatry, are the beginnings of one of the most re- 
markable racial, and the greatest moral movements of the 
world. No other event has been so momentous, far 
reaching and prolonged as a moral constructive force in 
the upbuilding of civilization. But withal it is to be said, 
that there is no evidence that Abraham had any notion 
of a future life. His idea of Jehovah, and that of the 
Hebrew people on being led through the wilderness, and 
in their national life in Canaan, was that of a temporal 
ruler. In all the highly penal and bloody code of the Books 
of the Law, so harshly and cruelly in contrast with the 
mild and benevolent system of morals given to the world 
by Christ, there is nothing indicating belief in rewards and 
punishments in a future life. And it is especially to 
be noted that in the only part of the code given to Israel 
in which it is said that it was "written with the finger of 
God," i. e., on the Tables of Stone, the only penalties 
denounced against disobedience are secular and temporal. 
This omission may well be explained by the fact that the 
scheme of Moses was political — a scheme of temporal 
government for the Hebrew people as a nation. It was 
not the founding of a church having a spiritual relation to 
a future life. In the first book of Samuel it is recorded 
that when the elders demanded of Samuel, the prophet 
and judge, that he "make" them a king, Jehovah said to 
Samuel "they have not rejected thee, but have rejected 
me, that I should not be King over them." Their national 
organization was political, with Jehovah as their invisible 
King, as they believed. As late as the time of Christ 
when the Jewish people were held in subjection to Rome, 
even his Jewish disciples "hoped that it was he who 
should have redeemed Israel." 

It is true that in the later history of the Jewish 
people the sect of the Pharisees arose who believed in 



ANTIQUITY OF BELIEF 17 

the resurrection of the dead. Josephus is quoted in the 
Standard Bible Dictionary — title Pharisees — as saying 
that they were the Jewish equivalent of one of the leading 
schools of Greek Philosophy. But the Saducees, the 
aristocracy to which the high priests and their families 
and the Judges and officials belonged, and who rejected 
the oral law, and held that only the written law as 
given by Moses was obligatory, did not believe in the 
resurrection. 

Though the Jewish people were without faith in a 
future life, they believed that a righteous Jehovah was 
their temporal ruler and that they were subject to his 
sanctions either approbatory or penal in national and 
individual life, according as their conudct was good or 
evil. This faith imparted a general high moral tone 
for the greater part of their independent national ex- 
istence, to their literature; and supplemented as this 
came to be by the Christian idea of the universal brother- 
hood of man, and the immortality of the morally fit, 
it may be taken as the greatest, and perhaps final and 
still progressive moral evolution by which the entire 
race will in the long run of the ages to come, attain 
the high level of the Golden Rule. 

Coming on down the stream of time we find the great- 
est philosophers of Greece teaching the doctrine of the 
immortality of the soul. Socrates had ideas of God 
and immortality much as have been entertained by 
Christian peoples, though not without a vestige of the 
pagan notion of other gods, for in the last hour of his 
life he requested his friend Crito to offer a cock to 
Aesculapius. 

Many centuries later, out of the dead level of Jewish 
corruption, and exclusiveness, and even idolatry, and the 
bestiality and atheism of the world-absorbing Roman 



18 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

Empire, like a world-wide moral searchlight, "Towering 
o'er the wrecks of time," rose Jesus of Nazareth, pur- 
porting to come from God, whose devotion to humanity 
was attested on the Cross, who said: "I am the resur- 
rection and the life; he that believeth on me though 
he die, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and be- 
lieveth on me shall never die." In every age since the 
Christian epoch, multitudes of his disciples, in every 
condition of life, have derived consolation and hope 
from this assurance. 



AGE OF SCEPTICISM 19 



II 



AGE OF SCEPTICISM — CAUSES OF WANING FAITH 



Whatever the cause, or rather combination of causes, 
having their root in physical science in its conflicts 
with theological dogmas and in economic and social 
conditions, the wide consensus of the well informed is 
that there is a momentus drift away from belief in God 
as an actual Being, and from the hope and consolations 
to be found in faith in a future life. 

The late Professor LeConte, of the University of 
California, in his book on "Evolution and Its Relation 
to Religious Thoughts," said: "There can be no doubt 
that there is at present a strong and to many an over- 
whelming tendency towards materialism. The amazing 
achievements of modern science; the absorption of intel- 
lectual energy in the investigation of external nature 
and the laws of matter have created a current in that 
direction so strong that of those who feel its influence — 
of those who do not stay at home shut up in their creeds, 
but walk abroad in the light of modern thought — it 
sweeps away and bears on its bosom all but the strong- 
est and most reflecting minds." 

Rev. George Adam Smith in his "Lectures on the 
Lyman Beecher Foundation" in Yale University in 1901, 



20 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

said: "In the first place, we can scarcely find today any 
parish or congregation of educated people, in which 
are not some almost as devoid of hope for the future 
as the most despairing Psalmist in the Psalter. In the 
thinking of civilized men there have been for years a 
steady ebb from the shores of another life." 

The testimony of the late President Harper, of the 
University of Chicago to the same effect, is important 
and highly significant. In a communication to the 
Sunday Interocean of May 17, 1903, among other mat- 
ters of importance, he said: 

"This is the age of scepticism. The university train- 
ing tends to make the student doubt the lessons which 
he blindly received in his childhood. Before he will 
again believe them true he must solve them in his own 
mind. If he has been rightly grounded in the funda- 
mental principles, the fire of doubt will only transmute 
him into firmer belief. If he has not been properly 
prepared his ideals will fall, probably never to rise 
again." 

"As far as the outward show of religion is concerned 
there is every indication that infidelity has increased 
in our Universities. The religion of the educated man 
is becoming less based on theological dogmas, more 
based on demonstrable truths, more determined to find 
expression in better social conditions and larger social 
sympathies." However, the distinguished President ex- 
pressed himself as not being without hope for the future, 
for he thought he saw an increasing tendency to practice 
the distinguishing virtues of Christianity. 

In what Dean Hodges, of the Episcopal Theology 
School at Cambridge, Mass., has to say in the ("Maga- 
zine") Outlook for August, 1906, of the "Religious Life 
in American Colleges," there is a startling statement of 



AGE OF SCEPTICISM 21 

the indifference to religion which prevails in Harvard 
University. Prior to June, 1886, attendance at prayers 
had been required. After that date attendance was 
made voluntary. "The immediate result was to empty 
the chapel, and the pews have never since been filled/' 
Of the 2,000 students in the academic courses and the 
five hundred teachers, only about 150 daily attend 
at chapel. At Sunday evening services the attendance 
is somewhat larger. "The Voluntary system brings out 
those who care." What is the cause of this indifference? 
Is it cultivation of the "head" at the expense of the 
"heart" — these symbols of the intellectual and moral 
in man's mental constitution? Is it because the study 
of "modern psychological science dispenses altogether 
with the soul"? and that the "new psychologists have 
ceased to think nobly of the soul, and even speak of it 
as a complete superfluity," as the distinguished Pro- 
fessor Osier recently said at Harvard. 

Thus writes Goldwin Smith, in the North American 
Review for May, 1904: "However, it would seem that 
we have come practically to a point at which Evolution 
and the Higher Criticism having between them done the 
work of demolition, and the work of reconstruction 
being still in the future, no small part of educated man- 
kind has renounced or is gradually renouncing the hope 
of a future life and acting on the belief that death ends 
all." 

A large majority of those who are identified with the 
various religious sects, know little or nothing about the 
Higher Criticism. They regard it as going to the root 
of Christian faith, and the discrediting of the so-called 
Mosaic books, so long believed to have been composed 
by Divine Inspiration, as sapping the foundation of the 
whole Christian system. It is not uncommon to hear 



22 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

people of even more than average intelligence assert- 
ing, that if they are to give up the Mosaic account of 
Creation as mere legend derived from the ancient east, 
they can have no faith in anything purporting to be of 
Divine authenticity. They know little or nothing of the 
archaelogical and historical reasons upon which the 
Higher Criticism is based and which reverent scholar- 
ship holds not to be inconsistent with sound Christian 
faith. And as to the doctrine of evolution, there are 
but few comparatively who understand it and believe 
it. To the great body of the common people it seems 
to remove God entirely out of the scheme of Creation. 

But there is a larger body of mankind who do not 
appear to be much concerned about a future life and 
upon whom Christianity, as represented by the various 
sectarian divisions, has but little influence as to their 
faith in another existence beyond the grave. This class 
of people are chiefly influenced by material and social 
conditions. Their want of faith in, or at any rate seem- 
ing indifference to, the future life, does not rest in an 
intelligent conviction that there is no basis in science or 
natural reason for such belief. It is not easy to per- 
ceive and clearly define their mental attitude. Perhaps 
it may be attributed to mere want of serious reflection 
on the subject. It is difficult for anyone in ordinary 
health to have a lively realization that any hour of the 
day one may die; and so there largely prevails an un- 
reflecting inclination to make the most of things material 
which immediately affect domestic life and the relations 
of the individual and family to society. 

One of the strong influences tending to bring about this 
result — or, at any rate which prevents the counteract- 
ing of the increasing tendency — is the secular and Christ- 
less spirit so largely prevailing in the sectarian churches 



AGE OF SCEPTICISM 23 

— the wide disparity between profession and practice — 
between precept and example. As a general rule it is 
not easy to distinguish between the common run of the 
membership in their behavior in political and business 
affairs, and in social life, from well behaved people out 
of the churches. And in the large commercial and 
monetary centers where wealth is such a controlling 
factor, the social arrogance and clannishness of wealthy 
members in their relations with others not of their "set" 
even in the churches, and the chilling atmosphere of the 
meeting-houses where the highly respectable rich 
assemble to "plume their feathers," and to introspec- 
tively contemplate their happy condition and superior 
virtues, and from which the stranger and the ill-clad 
poor are excluded by the stong stare of the usher, have 
been greatly influential in driving large masses of people, 
especially the wage earning classes, into indifference and 
scepticism. These people, who in one way or other, 
are driven away from the churches, find recourse in 
secret and mutual aid organizations which rival the 
churches in fraternal spirit and in their benevolences. 
A labor-union convention is reported to have passed a 
resolution in which it is declared in substance, that the 
labor organizations have done more for the benefit and 
improvement of the laboring people than all the churches. 
The distinguished President of Harvard University 
not long ago in an article on "The Voluntary Church in 
a Democracy" made this statement, among other mat- 
ters of much interest: "Obviously there is a good co- 
operative purpose in membership in an insurance ar- 
canum, or in a grange, or in a temperance lodge; 
whereas Church membership has in the past been too 
often represented as a measure taken to secure personal 
participation in future advantages accessible only to a 



24 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

select few." No doubt there are saintly souls every- 
where who are animated by the spirit of New Testa- 
ment Christianity but this does not break the force of 
the general indictment. 






DECLINE OF RELIGION 25 



III 

DECLINE OF RELIGION AND CONSEQUENT MORAL DISASTER 

No greater moral misfortune could happen to a 
people than to have their faith shaken in the religious 
dogmas and traditions of many generations without 
a sufficient period of probation to allow a sifting out 
of the mythical and superstitious and a settling down 
upon a faith which appeals to the highest and best in 
the spiritual nature of man — the simple and sufficient 
faith expressed on the Mount that the pure in heart 
shall see God in the future life. 

This finds illustration in what has occurred and is 
occurring in certain Latin countries. In general it may 
be said that in the South American States, in the lives 
of the common people, Christianity seems to have lost 
its spiritual meaning and reforming influence. The cere- 
monials and ritual of the church have lost their symboli- 
cal and spiritual meaning. Christianity consists not in 
daily living, but in the observance of the mechanical and 
spectacular. It may be said without intending irrever- 
ance, that the brutal and bloody bull-fight seems to be 
next in attraction to the mass, is the chief diversion of 
the Lord's Day. 

In Italy, especially in Rome, right within the shadow 
of St. Peter's and the Vatican, the anti-clerical feeling 
is hostile and violent. No stronger testimony can be 



26 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

given of the feeling hostile to the Church than the elec- 
tion of a Jew to the chief magistracy of the Capital of 
the Catholic world. This spirit prevails in various 
parts of Italy. What is the cause of this spirit of hos- 
tility is not entirely clear. It may be due somewhat to 
the course of the Vatican towards the Crown and 
Italian unity. But whatever the cause the alienation 
appears to be radical and final. The anti-Church tendency 
is also extending in France. In both Italy and France the 
reaction does not appear to be towards Protestantism, 
but towards atheism. The people of these countries 
have for so many generations been taught that there 
is no other religion than the Catholic religion that to 
break with that means no religion at all. 

Dr. Draper in his "Intellectual Development of 
Europe" has well said: "Nations plunged into the abyss 
of irreligion must necessarily be nations of anarchy" — 
moral anarchy certainly, and probably ultimate political 
anarchy. The anarchist of today is an atheist. 

The moral cohesion and progressive development of 
human society has ever been associated with religion and 
belief in a Being or beings superior to man; as for in- 
stance the fabled gods of the pagans, or the Jehovah 
of the Hebrews, and of the Christian era, by whom 
sanctions were imposed either in this life or in the world 
to come, and moral restraints have become relaxed and 
moral degeneration has followed the loss of such faith. 
It is hardly too much to say that as a general rule the 
want of such faith tends to relax the moral fiber and 
lower the practice of moral living. There may be outward 
conformity to the conventional or common standards 
of morality even without the consciousness of being held 
in restraint by the general sentiment; but on crucial 
occasions, when confronted with the opportunity of de- 



DECLINE OF RELIGION 27 

riving great personal advantage which will not bear the 
test of intrinsic morality, but with no loss of credit in 
society, it is not the many who will safely pass the 
ordeal. There cannot be that rooted and grounded fear 
of inward moral taint, that recoiling from the thought 
of stain of soul, which more surely influences the con- 
duct of those who believe in immortality and the divine 
source of the moral law. All history reinforces the be- 
lief that the vast body of mankind, even of the countries 
thought to be most enlightened and morally elevated, 
must be held in restraint by sanctions of some sort or 
other. The most elevated Christian peoples believe in 
sanctions, and are more or less influenced by such be- 
lief. It is true that individuals are to be found so prac- 
ticed in virtue, so refined and elevated in character that 
they never on any occasion seriously entertain the 
thought of wrong doing. 

"Evil in the mind of God or man 

May come and go so unapproved, and leave 

No spot or blame behind." 

Logically there can be no escape from the conclusion 
that if there is to be no life beyond bodily death, there 
can be no act or intent intrinsically moral or immoral. 
And the certainty that society political and social, civili- 
zation, could not exist in the total universal condition 
that there is no such moral state as intrinsically essen- 
tial morality — that no act or intent, is intrinsically 
wicked; and the fact that all civilized society worthy 
the name rests upon the bottom of universal conviction 
of the essential nature of right and wrong, logically 
forces the conclusion that this moral sense is natural 
and inherent in man's mental constitution — as much so 
as the power to think at all. That motive and conduct 



28 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

to be of essential value must be subject to a tribunal 
posessing the infallible intelligence to perceive the 
secret intent, and the universal power to enforce sanc- 
tions, if motive and conduct are to be considered of more 
than ephemeral, uncertain and conventional value, 
logically forces the conviction that such tribunal must 
exist in another life or not at all. If not, the result 
would be the same as if the sense of the intrinsic essen- 
tial nature of right and wrong did not exist at all. 

The Apostle Paul recognized this logical necessity, 
for he said in First Corinthians, "If the dead are not 
raised let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die." What 
compensation to man can there be in the "few days and 
full of trouble/' for the eternal night of the grave?; as 
he lies in the ground, decaying down to dust, of what 
greater consequence is he than the horse or dog? Really, 
it would seem that to the man of serious thought, if con- 
vinced that this earth contains for him all of conscious 
existence, it would rather be better not to have lived at 
all. Miss Sophie Witte quotes Tolstoy, in the Inde- 
pendent, as writing to his aunt Tatyana, "I saw my 
brother's death. Nothing can be worse than death, and 
if we consider death as the inevitable end of every living 
being, we must admit that there is nothing worse than 
life." Cicero, in his "Paradoxes" said, "Death is dread- 
ful to the man whose all is extinguished with his life, 
but not to him whose glory never can die." No doubt 
the consciousness which some men have that they will 
be famous throughout all historic time, compensates in 
large measure for the doubts they may entertain of a 
future state of existence. 

On first blush it is probable that not many would 
assent that if there is to be no life after bodily death, 
there can be nothing intrinsically morally right or wrong. 



DECLINE OF RELIGION 29 

Most people would say, thinking only of the present state 
of civilization, "Right is right in any event. ,, Yes! as 
a matter of expediency. It is no doubt true that in an 
economical and social sense "Honesty is the best policy." 
People succeed better in business affairs in the long run, 
and are better respected in the society in which they 
move, if it is found that they can be trusted. 

But the field in which organized society can take cog- 
nizance of the transactions of men either to enforce 
rectitude in the performance of agreements, or in the 
protection of persons and property, is comparatively 
limited. And on account of the fallibility or perverse- 
ness of human testimony, and the fallibility of human 
tribunals the failure of justice in courts of law, is not 
uncommon. No crime is so immune as murder. In no 
case can human tribunals get at the heart of man. In 
no case can motive, the real intent, be ascertained except 
inferentially and mistakes are frequently made. In 
ordinary social relations people often grossly misjudge 
each other. Motive is the controlling factor morally in 
the serious affairs of life. This is so generally received 
as true, that in the investigation of crime, when it is 
found impossible to find a rational motive for an act 
deemed criminal, it is usually attributed to aberrancy in 
some form or other. It is true that motive is sometimes 
so complex that no man can always feel sure as to the 
predominant motive that controls his own conduct. 

It is a common experience that there are many offenses 
against the moral law of which courts of law cannot 
take cognizance, and for which there is no legal redress 
— conduct which the common consensus condemns as 
in violation of the fundamental rules of common 
honesty which prevails in Christian lands. In such 
cases, if the man is certain that he is not amenable to 



30 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

proceedings in courts of law, and has no belief that 
he will be accountable in another life for "deeds done 
in the body," what motive can he have for what he does 
but that which he decides for himself will best promote 
his individual interest, either socially or in business 
affairs. He has no standard of moral doing which he 
recognizes as valid, aside from that which is temporal 
and human, and variable as the customs and conditions 
of human society. How can it be otherwise? 

Recognizing the moral deterioration consequent upon 
loss of faith in the future life, Goldwin Smith in a com- 
munication to the New York Sun among other interest- 
ing things said: "Since the subversion of religious be- 
lief, morality is dragging its anchor." 

The Literary Digest of Feb. 2, 1907, makes some selec- 
tions from recent editorials appearing in the Wall Street 
Journal concerning the moral effect in business of the 
want of belief in a future state of existence. Coming 
as they do from one conducting an important financial 
and commercial journal at the center of the greatest 
financial transactions of the continent, what he writes 
is well worth noting. Asserting that there is such a de- 
cline of faith, Mr. Pratt, the editor, observes that it 
"alters the basic conditions of civilization," "becomes a 
factor in the market," "changes the standard and affects 
the value of things that are bought and sold," "there is 
no one who would not prefer to do business with a per- 
son who really believes in a future life." 

"The question, therefore, of practical, immediate, and 
tremendous importance to Wall Street quite as much as 
any other part of the world, is, has there been a decline 
in faith in the future life? and if so, to what 
extent is this responsible for the special phenomena of 
our time — the eager pursuit of sudden wealth, the 



DECLINE OF RELIGION 31 

shameless luxury and display, the gross and corrupting 
extravagance, 'the misuse of swollen fortunes,' the in- 
difference to law, the growth of graft, the abuses of 
great corporate power, the social unrest, the spread of 
demagogy, the advance of socialism, the appeals to bitter 
class hatred? To find out what connection exists be- 
tween a decadence in religious faith and the social unrest 
of our time, due, on one side, to oppressive use of finan- 
cial power, and, on the other, to class agitation, might 
well be worth an investigation by a commission of 
government experts, if it were possible for the Govern- 
ment to enter into such an undertaking." 

An ever memorable example of the bad effect of loss 
of faith in the one true and living God, and of a want 
of faith in a future state of existence, is afforded in 
the career of Solomon, King or Israel. In the begin- 
ning of his reign, with devout reverence for Jehovah, 
and the erection of the magnificent temple devoted to 
His worship, he ended his life a despairing pessimist, 
in brutal lust and idolatry: "Now King Solomon loved 
many foreign women, together with Pharaoh's daughter. 
. . . Solomon clave unto these in love. And 
he had several hundred wives, princesses, and three hun- 
dred concubines; and his wives turned away his heart. 
For it came to pass, when Solomon was old, that his 
wives turned away his heart after other gods. . . . 
And Solomon did that which was evil in the sight of 
Jehovah." He built altars to heathen gods upon which 
his foreign wives "burnt incense and sacrificed unto 
their gods."— (1 Kings, 11) 

It is conceivable, no doubt probable, that one born 
and bred in the atmosphere and influences of a civili- 
zation due to Christianity, but yet does not believe in 
God and immortality, may have a high sense of what is 



32 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

morally right, and lead a life of rectitude ; but inevitably 
he would have less power of resistance and weaker 
motive to resist wrong doing, under stress of the strong 
temptation which comes to most, if not all people, in 
the midst of even the best moral surroundings, than 
one of equal natural moral fiber who believes that con- 
duct and motive will momentously influence his destiny 
in another life. And it is quite certain that there is 
a large body of people of even the most enlightened 
nations, who, not believing in a future state of existence, 
are held in restraint only by law or public opinion. No 
man can possibly be made better by such want of be- 
lief. The inevitable result would be — justified by 
memorable epochs in the history of the race — that 
society would be made worse were such belief to come 
generally to prevail. It is hardly too much to say that 
the man who advocates it, however correct his motives 
and upright his life may be, is in effect the enemy of 
his kind. 



WHAT NEGATIONISTS WOULD GIVE 33 



IV 

WHAT NEGATIONISTS WOULD GIVE US 

Now what has the negationist to offer as a substitute 
for this loss of faith and the lowering of the high ideals 
of the moral life? 

Here is the picture which the philosopher of Jena, in 
his "Riddle of the Universe," with brutal candor draws 
for our delectation : 

"Our own human nature, which exalted itself into 
an image of God in its anthrophistic illusions sinks to 
the level of a placental mammal, which has no more 
value for the universe at large than the ant, the fly of 
a summer's day, the microscopic infusiorium, or the 
smallest bacillus. Humanity is but a transitory phase 
of the evolution of eternal substance, a particular 
phenomenal form of matter and energy, the true pro- 
portions of which we soon perceive when we set it 
out on the background of infinite space and eternal time. 
. . . The best we can desire after a courageous 
life, spent in doing good according to our light, is the 
eternal peace of the grave." But there can be no peace 
in oblivion. There is no peace in the oblivion of sleep. 
The peace comes on waking to a feeling of rest and 
refreshment, of the restoration of exhausted energies. 
What is Haeckers peace but the peace of the chemical 
constitutents of the human body which death and de- 



34 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

cay resolve into the elementary forms which pervade 
earth and air? 

Nor do we see a helping hand held out to us by the 
agnostic school of philosophers and scientists, high in 
the ranks of whom stand Huxley and Spencer. In all 
his vast projects of synthesizing and unifying philoso- 
phy, Mr. Spencer ignores the problem of the future life. 
In the realm of the psychic he treats only of phenomena. 
What lies behind phenomena he holds to be unknowable. 
While in set terms disavowing materialism, what he 
has to say about the source of the moral sense and its 
final practical perfection in the life of the race, is incon- 
sistent with the idea that it is an attribute of soul per- 
sonality. He treats it as a physico-moral evolution con- 
summating as a physiological function: "So do I be- 
lieve" ("Data of Ethics") "that the experiences of 
utility, organized and consolidated through all past 
generations of the human race have been producing 
corresponding nervous modifications, which, by con- 
tinued transmission and accumulation, have become in 
us certain faculties of moral intuition — certain emotions 
responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no 
apparent basis in the individual experiences of utility"; 
and so, "In their proper times and places and propor- 
tions" (whatever that may mean) "the moral senti- 
ments will guide men just as spontaneously and ade- 
quately as now do the sensations." This may properly be 
termed physiological morality. 

And thus Huxley: "For the assumed substantial 
entity, spirit, which is supposed to underlie the phenom- 
ena of consciousness, as matter underlies those of a 
physical nature, leaves not even a geometrical ghost 
when these phenomena are abstracted. And even if 
we suppose the existence of such an entity apart from 



WHAT NEGATIONISTS WOULD GIVE 35 

qualities, that is to say, a bare existence for mind, how- 
does anybody know that it differs from that other entity 
apart from qualities, which is the supposed substratum 
of matter?" .... "And if I try to think of the 
'spirit' which a man by this hypothesis, carries about 
under his hat, as something devoid of relation to space, 
and as something indivisible, even in thought, while 
it is, at the same time, supposed to be in that place 
and to be possessed of half a dozen different faculties, 
I confess I get quite lost." The assertion of Huxley 
that when the "phenomena of consciousness" are ab- 
stracted" there is not left "even a geometrical ghost," 
is without point and force when it is considered that 
there is never a moment of time in normal waking 
human experience when the "phenomena of conscious- 
ness" are not present. 

There seems to be no agnosticism in the philosophy or 
science of Haeckel. He writes with as much confidence 
of soul personality and immortality as any familiar fact 
in the field of biology. He treats soul entity as a fallacy 
once for all to be as briefly disposed of as any 
other fallacy exploded by natural science. Thus in his 
"Riddle": "The extreme importance of the subject leads 
us to oppose to these untenable 'proofs of immortality,' 
a brief exposition of the sound scientific arguments 
against it." And this is one of his "sound scientific 
arguments against it" : "If then the substance of the soul 
were really gaseous, it should be possible to liquefy it 
by the application of a high pressure at a low tempera- 
ture. We could then catch the soul as it 'breathed out' 
at the moment of death, condense it, and exhibit it in 
a bottle as 'Immortal fluid' (fluid animae immortale.) 
By a further lowering of temperature and increase of 
pressure it might be possible to solidify it — to produce 



36 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

'soul snow'. The experiment has not yet succeeded." 
On reading this one may well say with Sir Oliver Lodge, 
in "Life and Matter," that philosophers "have found by 
experience that men of science who have once trans- 
cended the boundary" (between philosophy and science) 
"are apt to lose all sense of reasonable constraint, and 
to disport themselves as if they had at length escaped 
into a region free from scientific trammels — a region 
where confident assertions might be freely made, where 
speculative hypothesis might rank as theory" (might 
well say rank as science) "and where verification was 
both unnecessary and impossible." 

It is said that it is in the interest of truth that these 
negationists either deny the existence of soul personality, 
or ignoring that question altogether, speak of the moral 
sense as having no bearing on the subject of the future 
life. Truth! What is truth? Nearly two thousand 
years ago the Roman procurator, before whom Christ 
was arraigned, propounded this query which has gravely 
concerned the honest thinker in every age. Doubting, 
and awed in the presence of the man whose marvelous 
personal majesty and mysterious power, was to move 
all future generations of men and uplift the race, Pilate 
said, "What is truth?" On another occasion Christ had 
said, "I am the way, the truth, the Life"; "Ye shall 
know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." 
How free? The truth that frees the soul from the pro- 
pensions of the things that are "of the earth, earthy" — 
the truth that takes away the sting of death, that defeats 
the victory of the grave. The "truth" of spiritual nihil- 
ism means slavery to things material and perishing, 
degrading dread of annihilation. 






SOUL PERSONALITY 37 



V 

SOUL PERSONALITY 

It is, of course, of first importance to be able to arrive 
at the reasonable assurance that man possesses a spirit- 
ual entity in order that a reasonable hope may be enter- 
tained of immortality. No one, not even the most earn- 
est believer in God and immortality, claims that we can 
know that God exists, and that we have souls which 
may, if morally fit, become immortal, as we know things 
that are open to the observation of the senses. No one 
knows how we think, nor what it is that thinks. In a 
sense not vague nor ambiguous, one may have meta- 
physical knowledge. One can know nothing in the ex- 
tensive field of philosophy as things can be taken cogni- 
zance of in physical science. In the sense that Huxley 
must be understood to disclaim knowledge of the soul, 
nothing can be known of many matters concerning which 
the philosopher may and does have metaphysical knowl- 
edge, and entertains no doubt. The consideration of 
causes which lie behind proximate causes come within 
the sphere of philosophy. The professional psychologist 
is so confident of the accuracy of his knowledge con- 
cerning mental phenomena, that psychology is termed a 
science; yet much of the subject lies in the region of 
the speculative and metaphysical. 

Dr. Maudsley in his "Physiology of Mind" does not 
treat Psychology with much respect as a true science. 
Thus he writes: "He who would realize how vague, 



38 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

uncertain, speculative, how far from the position of a 
true science, psychology is, should endeavor to grasp 
some one of its so-called principles, and to apply it 
deductively in order to predicate something of the char- 
acter of a particular person ; let him do that, and he can- 
not fail to perceive how much he has been mocked with 
the semblance of knowledge, and must needs agree with 
Bacon as to the necessity of a 'scientific and accurate 
dissection of minds and characters and the secret dis- 
positions of particular men V " 

Huxley, though an avowed agnostic, ventures into 
the field of speculation thus; "It is quite true, that, to 
the best of my judgment, the argumentation which ap- 
plies to brutes holds equally good for men; and there- 
fore, that all states of consciousness in us, as in them, 
are immediately caused by the molecular changes of 
the brain substance. It seems to me that in men, as in 
brutes, there is no proof that any state of consciousness 
is the cause of change in the motion of the matter of 
the organism. " This distinctly attributes mental 
phenomena to physical causation or it means nothing. 
Perhaps it would be better to say that he holds that 
mental phenomena find their root in physiological action. 

Mr. Spencer concedes that there is "something" 
which lies behind "mental activities" of which these 
"activities" are symbolical. Thus: "Mind as known to 
the possessor of it, is a circumscribed aggregate of ac- 
tivities and the cohesion of these activities, one with 
another throughout the aggregate compels the postulat- 
tion of a something of which they are the activities." 
That is to say, if understood correctly, compels the con- 
clusion that there is "something" v/hich is manifested 
by "activities" — a "something" existing prior to the "ac- 
tivities," which causes the "activities." As the author 



SOUL PERSONALITY 3* 

holds that matter "is but the symbol of some form of 
Power absolutely and forever unknown to us" — a 
symbol of that which "we cannot suppose to be like the 
reality" — so mind also is unknowable and is "but a 
symbol of something that cannot be rendered into 
thought." As to what this "postulate" is he professes 
to know nothing, except perhaps in a negative sense, 
i. e., that it is not something which a "man carries about 
under his hat" — is not "something" which exists in the 
absence of consciousness, and "possessed of half a dozen 
faculties." That which makes us conscious of ideas 
is an "unknown permanent nexus which is never itself 
a state of consciousness but which holds states of con- 
sciousness together"; that is to say, a permanent un- 
known "something" which possesses no element of con- 
sciousness yet goes to make up consciousness — is the 
cause of consciousness. 

Professor James of Harvard, in a footnote in the 
first volume of his Psychology, quoting a passage from 
Mr. Spencer which seems to be an attempt to explain 
the origin of consciousness, makes this comment: "It 
is true that in the Forthnightly Review (vol. XIV, p. 
716) Mr. Spencer denies that he means by this passage 
to tell us anything about the origin of consciousness at 
all. It resembles, however, too many other places in 
his psychology (e.g., sees. 43, 110, 244) not to be taken 
as a serious attempt to explain how consciousness may 
at a certain point be 'evolved' ; that when a critic calls 
his attention to the inanity of his words, Mr. Spencer 
should say that he never meant anything particular 
by them, is simply an example of the scandalous vague- 
ness with which this sort of 'Chromo Philosophy* is 
carried on." 



40 



IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 



VI 



FURTHER CONSIDERATION OF SOUL PERSONALITY PHYSIO- 



LOGICAL AND OTHER FORMS OF MATERIALISM 



Professor Ladd of Yale University, in his "Outlines 
of Physiological Psychology" says that "Some writers 
have gone so far as to advocate 'psychology without a 
soul' " ; and while he substantially concedes the field to 
the "new psychologists," he does not go so far as that. 
"For a long time," he says, "the so-called 'old psychology/ 
as pursued by the introspective and metaphysical method, 
made little or no advance. In a single generation, as 
pursued by the experimental and physiological method, 
the science of psychology has been largely reconstructed." 

But does this necessarily exclude all consideration of 
mind or soul as the reality behind mental phonemena? 
Indeed the Professor reserves to himself the right at 
the close of the more strictly scientific discussion of 
the book to verify certain conclusions as to the nature 
of the human mind, and as to its general connection with 
the bodily organism. Some of the considerations intro- 
duced at this point are of the kind ordinarily known as 
"metaphysical," for he holds that "psychology, even when 
it employs the physiological method, has the right and 
is under obligation, to suggest and defend true con- 
clusions as to the nature of mind." 



SOUL PERSONALITY 41 

Professor Wundt, the greatest of the German psycholo- 
gists, in speaking of the sum of the achievements and 
creations of the human mind" ("Human and Animal Psy- 
chology") says: "What is the ultimate goal of air this 
mighty current of mental development? Experience can- 
not answer; while the ideal completion of experience, 
which philosophy tries to discover, can have no other 
foundation than the development given in experience. 
It is here that psychology finds a place; it is one of the 
first witnesses called upon by philosophy for information 
which shall aid in her ideal construction." Furthermore : 
. . . "the hypothesis that mental development 
might somewhere come to an end, to be replaced by 
simply nothing, would, of course, imply a recognition 
of the invalidity of any ideal completion. More than 
that, the whole of the mental content of the universe 
would cease to have any significance. For what mean- 
ing could we read into mental life in general other than 
that of a great and lamentable illusion, the growing 
store of man's mental possessions confirming him more 
and more strongly in his justifiable expectation of further 
development, while the end of all things should still 
be nothingness." 

Why limit psychology to the study of the mere 
mechanism of the temporal and spacial relations of man's 
mentality? "Science discovers, describes, registers the 
facts; philosophy interprets them." "We next need to 
know what they mean, and what the cause is that under- 
lies the cosmic processes." "What is the nature of the 
causality, and is it moving towards any goal ? ( Bowne's 
"Personalism") Why separate the facts from the philo- 
sophy of the facts? How profitless to limit the study 
to the discovery of the temporal and spacial relations 
of mental processes, and their description in dry, pro- 



42 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

fessional and difficult terminology, and there leave them. 
If the philosophical interpretation of the facts leads to 
the metaphysical conclusion that they mean sensualism, 
or materialism, or agnosticism, or pantheism, or athe- 
ism, or that a soul personality lies behind and is the mov- 
ing cause of mental phenomena, why so be it. The best 
reason, that which best satisfies man's mentality, that 
which the history of the race best demonstrates to be 
the true source of the progress and moral uplift of the 
race, must ultimately prevail. 

Though it may be hardly admissable to indulge in 
the temerity of calling in question the exclusively ex- 
perimental, or mechanical method of the "new psychol- 
ogy," one can hardly refrain from considering its moral 
effect, and its influence upon faith in the future life. 
The moral sense and its phenomena manifestations, be- 
long to the emotional side of mentality, and it is that 
attribute in the high development which we see in the 
good man, which transcendantly elevates him above the 
brutality of the man who "fears not God, nor regards 
man," and out of which spring the hope and faith of 
immortality. No one was /ever induced by cold reason 
alone to perform moral obligation as a sense of duty. 
He may perform moral obligations mechanically and as 
a matter of utility — for the one reason certainly that he 
finds "honesty to be the best policy." But there is no 
virtue, no morality in it. "If man is sociable and moral 
it is less because he thinks than because he feels in a 
certain manner and tends in a certain direction." (Rib- 
bot.) 

However unassailable the position of the "new psy- 
chology" may be in its scientific attitude, from the point 
of view of the moralist, the empirical or mechanical 
method leaves in the mind a sense of incompleteness, 



SOUL PERSONALITY 43 

not to say futility. It is so liable to be regarded as all 
there is in the subject worth while (and indeed is so 
taken by very many) that the thought naturally occurs 
that this method may be influential in producing the 
scepticism which is said to largely prevail in some of 
the higher institutions of learning. Phenomena so re- 
markable in manifestation, and so momentous in effect 
in the intellectual and moral life of the individual and 
of society, would seem to demand that the cause which 
lies behind it all would have place in every considera- 
tion of the subject. 

In the rage — if that word may be used in respectful 
sense — (the phrase noble rage has familiar place in 
literature) of a large section of physical scientists to 
account for everything psychical, including the highest 
cognitive powers of man, as the phenomenal manifesta- 
tion of natural or material forces, claiming as many 
do, that the "whole cognizable world is constituted, 
and has been developed in accordance with one common 
fundamental law," they discard everything that cannot 
be brought within the definitions and methods of physi- 
cal science. The conditions and indications of the begin- 
ning, growth, and death of individual man in his physi- 
cal characteristics, are so exactly like that the lower 
animals from which it is held he is "descended," that the 
devout believer is at times overwhelmed with apprehen- 
sion that after all, his destiny may be the same. So salient 
and so predominant are these physical characteristics 
in controlling the lives of the vast majority of the race, 
and so obscure and unknowable are the sources of the 
cognitive powers and their relation to the physical organ- 
ism, through which alone they are made manifest, that 
many of the most eminent in science find it impossible 
to believe but that the physical is all there is of man. 



44 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

Perhaps it is true to say that the "new psychology" is 
chiefly the outgrowth of the new physiology which made 
a rapid and revolutionary advance on the discovery that 
the cell is the biological unit of all organisms vegetable 
and animal, and that the germ-cell as formed by the fer- 
tilization of the human ovum of the female by the sper- 
matozoon of the male and their fusion into a new and 
common cell, is the genesis of every human being — 
that it is by and through this germ-cell that the organic 
and psychic life is perpetuated from generation to 
generation. All organic growth is by cell development 
and in fact the animal body is a body of cells. But the 
most remarkable and significant discovery — as seems 
to be generally agreed by biologists — is that there are 
certain microscopical bodies in the nuclea of the fertilized 
germ-cell which are the bearers of the heredity of the 
physical and psychical characteristics of the two ancestral 
lines. 

The discovery of the localization in various parts of 
the brain of the centers of sense perception is a signifi- 
cant contribution to the science of physiological psy- 
chology. Haeckel goes further and contends that the 
centers of the "higher psychic faculties — the asso- 
ciations of impressions, the formation of ideas and 
concepts, inductive and deductive" in the brain have been 
definitely traced, if he is understood correctly. And 
here is a parting of the ways between the physiologico- 
psychicological materialists who hold that method com- 
prises the whole of the problem, and the physiological 
psychologists who hold that the study of method is a 
study of the mechanism by and through which there is a 
revelation of the soul reality which lies behind it all. 

The external organs of sense, auditory, visual, olfac- 
tory, gustatory, tactile, differ in mechanical function. 



SOUL PERSONALITY 



45 



If the eye in some sense photographs objects, and by- 
its operation images are transmitted to the brain, this 
cannot be said of the other organs of sense. While the 
range of observation by the other organs of sense, other 
than the eye, is not nearly so great as by the eye, the 
impressions received by the brain are quite as distinct. 
In either case, the immediate effects are mechanical. The 
initial effect, and the transmission to the proper sensorial 
center, are mechanical. These movements contain no 
element of the psychic. Cognition does not take place 
until the sensorial center is reached. The action of light 
on the retina is no more cognitive than the action of light 
upon the sensitive paper of the photographer. There 
must be something possessing intellectual attributes 
capable, not only of perceiving and retaining the mental 
impression of the object perceived, but possessing the 
capacity to think about it, of considering its properties 
and intimate constitution, and of recollecting not only 
the object but what has been rationalized about it. Then 
when, and where, and how, does cognition take place? 
Is it in the sensorial centers where transformations occur 
from physical energy — say in the form of motion — to 
consciousness or thought — a something possessing no 
property of matter — a mere ideal state — a metaphysical 
abstraction — a state of abstraction in which it is impos- 
sible to discover the quantitative equivalent of the 
mechanical energy which has disappeared. Or is the 
cognition by a preexisting mind, or soul entity? Which 
strikes the mind as most reasonable? The transforma- 
tion of physical energy into mentality is necessary in the 
scheme of psycho-physical materialism and so it is 
assumed, but the assumption is without a shadow of 
scientific observation to support it. The resulting cor- 
relate and the only correlate which has ever been ascer- 



46 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

tained by measurment is a mechanical equivalent. The 
equivalent in cognition has never been discovered by 
measurement. The equivalent is purely a matter of 
speculation. 

If ideas are generated in the brain by physiological 
action what becomes of them? They must be "stored 
up" and remain intact as ideas somehow and somewhere, 
otherwise the vivid recalling of incidents, or ideas 
originating subjectively which had remained subcon- 
sciously for many years, cannot be accounted for. Is 
it possible that abstractions can become permanently 
incorporated in tangible organic substance, so that such 
organic matter may become intellectualized ? Abstract- 
thought cannot exist in the brain without being identi- 
fied with something that possesses duration. li it is 
not the phenomenal action of soul entity, or soul per- 
sonality what is it? It must be that ideas not only be- 
come incorporated with organic substance, but must 
somehow become capable of co-ordination, or as Mr. 
Spencer has it, "compounded and recompounded' , so 
that the process of reasoning may be carried on — so 
that continuous coherent thinking on some abstruse sub- 
ject may be carried on — so that a Sir Isaac Newton may 
discover how the worlds are held in their orbits — so 
that a Leverrier and an Adams may locate Neptune by 
ciphering on a slate — so that a Christ may revolutionize 
the moral life of mankind. 

In thinking about any subject we mentally use the 
language we use in talking about it, just as we think 
the words we use in writing about it. In solving mathe- 
mathetical problems we mentally see the figures used in 
the computation. It must be that in language forms, 
ideas are retained in memory. What is acquired is 
often forgotten for many years; is as absent from con- 



SOUL PERSONALITY 47 

sciousness as if it had never been known. When recur- 
ring to consciousness it recurs in the form of spoken or 
written language in which it was acquired, or what is 
more remarkable may be acquired in a language which 
may be entirely forgotten, and afterwards be recalled 
and communicated in a language subsequently acquired. 
While the language form in which it was acquired is 
forgotten the thought, the idea survives in the memory 
subconsciously. All the while the subject matter in 
general terms must be subsisting subconsciously some- 
how and somewhere, so that it may be recalled in another 
form entirely different from that in which it was ac- 
quired. This may be by mental direction, or it may 
occur suddenly and involuntarily while the mind is 
occupied upon a subject in no respect relating to, or 
bearing upon, the same subject. Upon the theory that 
the acquisition is a mechanico- or chemico-physiologi- 
cal process transforming and fixing the thought in the 
brain-cells, this mechanical mode of acquiring knowl- 
edge would seem to so fix knowledge in the form in which 
it is acquired as that the idea and the form would be 
inseparable and not subject to be recalled in a different 
form. It would seem no more possible to translate it 
into a different form of expression, than by volition to 
change the direction of nerve reflex action which occurs 
on the infliction of an injury, so that the resulting pain 
would be felt in a part remote from the seat of the 
injury. And this would seem also to preclude the pos- 
sibility that the acquisition and communication of knowl- 
edge could be the correlative action of a mechanical 
force. And it would seem also that this literal mechani- 
cal acquisition would forbid the idea of lapses in memory 
so long as the brain remains in normal condition; and 
it would seem reasonable that in brain decay of old 



48 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

age memory of what had been acquired in youth would 
fade away as certainly as what is acquired in old age. 
A formidable difficulty to be encountered in accept- 
ing the physiological materialistic hypotheses arises out 
of the fact of the several total changes of brain sub- 
stance which occur in the course of a life of average 
duration. In the disintegration and excretion of chemi- 
co-physiological action in brain structure and the reposit- 
ing of a new material by the nutritive process, involving 
frequent total changes from the old to the new, though 
retaining identity of form, what might be expected to 
be the effect upon the mind-fund? — the accumulation of 
former mental experiences? The nutrition of the brain 
structure, and the acquisition of mental experiences, are 
independent and wholly unlike processes and come from 
independent sources. The one comes from the diges- 
tion and assimilation of food. The other from experi- 
ences received through the external organs of sense, or 
from subjective ideation. Now, in the disintegration 
and secretion by chemico-physiological action of brain 
substance which contains or has been impressed by, or has 
become intellectualized by, these mental processes, what 
becomes of these registered experiences, or of this organ- 
ized thought? It would seem that the mentality thus 
acquired must necessarily disappear with the old tissue 
when eliminated. In this process of eliminating of the 
old and repositing of the new brain substance, how is it 
possible that former mental experiences can be retained ? 
It would seem to be impossible. Nor seem possible that 
they can be renewed without the identical recurrence of 
the former mental experiences, which, of course, is 
obviously impossible. And so does not physiological ma- 
terialism refute itself? 



EVOLUTION AND THE SOUL 49 



VII 

EVOLUTION AND THE SOUL 

"The discussion of man's place in nature and his 
derivation from less developed forms of animal life, 
which is sometimes known as anthropogenesis, or an- 
thropogeny, formed one of the first and most hotly con- 
tested discussions in the history of the doctrine of evo- 
lution, while no consensus has yet been reached in regard 
to the derivation of mental endowments from those of 
the higher animals, or the precise relation of the two 
to each other." (Baldwin's "Dictionary of Philosophy 
and Psychology," 1901, title Anthropology.) 

Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace, the illustrious and still 
surviving contemporary of Darwin, and an original and 
independent explorer in the field of evolution, dissents 
from Darwin as to the origin of the mental faculties 
characteristic of man. He particularly instances the 
accomplishments of men of high talents and genius in 
mathematics, in art, and in music as being so exceptional, 
and above the general level of development in the quali- 
ties esentially distinguishing men from animals, and 
therefore common to all men whether savage or civilized, 
that they could not have originated in the evolutionary 
process by variation and natural selection. There are 
certain mental traits common to the race differentiating 
man and animals and without which he would not be 
man. The mathematical, the artistic, and the musical, 



50 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

in which particulars a limited few of the race have been 
so transcendently distinguished, do not belong to these 
necessary and common mental traits, but yet may be con- 
sidered as illustrations of the possible, perhaps probable, 
future development of the entire race, and so could not 
have originated in the biological law of variation, and 
of natural selection ; and, as Wallace says in his book on 
"Darwinism," they must have been "superadded" from 
some other source. These "special faculties . . . 
clearly point to the existence in man of something which 
he has not derived from his animal progenitors — some- 
thing which we may best refer to as being of a spiritual 
essence or nature, capable of progressive development 
under favorable conditions. On the hypothesis of this 
spiritual nature, super-added to the animal nature of 
man, we are able to understand much that is otherwise 
mysterious or unintelligible in regard to him, especially 
the enormous influence of ideas, principles, and beliefs 
over his whole life and actions. Thus alone we can 
understand the constancy of the martyr, the unselfishness 
of the philanthropist, the devotion of the patriot, the 
enthusiasm of the artist, and the resolute and persevering 
search of the scientific worker after nature's secrets. 
Thus we may perceive that' the love of truth, the delight 
in beauty, the passion for justice, and the thrill of exul- 
tation with which we hear of any act of courageous 
self-sacrifice, are the workings within us of a higher 
nature which has not been developed within us by the 
strugglel for material existence." 

And again, the three distinct steps of progressive de- 
velopment from (1) the "inorganic to organic, when 
the earliest vegetable cell, or the living protoplasm out 
of which it arose, first appeared," to the next stage (2) 
"still more marvelous, still more completely beyond all 






EVOLUTION AND THE SOUL 51 

possibility of explanation by matter, its laws and forces," 
the "introduction of sensation or consciousness, consti- 
tuting the fundamental distinction between the animal 
and vegetable kingdoms"; and (3) the final stage where 
there appears "in man a number of his most character- 
istic and noblest faculties, those which raise him furthest 
above the brutes and open up possibilities of almost in- 
finite advancement" — point clearly to an unseen uni- 
verse — to a world of spirit, to which the world of matter 
is altogether subordinate." 

The distinguished author does not formulate a hy- 
pothesis as to how, and at what stage of the evolutionary 
process, the spiritual nature was superadded to the ani- 
mal nature of man. He only states his general conclu- 
sion that the origin of the mental faculties character- 
istic of men "could only find an adequate cause in the 
unseen universe of spirit." 

How or when organisms first appeared does not ad- 
mit of a solution upon any theory of the laws, or pro- 
cesses or forces relating to inorganic matter yet dis- 
closed by science. Natural selection, or the survival of 
the fittest, does not afford any solution as that theory 
begins with existing organisms. To attribute their origin 
to spontaneous generation explains nothing. That hy- 
pothesis, starting out with the absolute non-existence of 
organic matter, requires its production by inorganic pro- 
cesses, the arranging, or combinations of inorganic atoms 
— the atoms of carbon as it is said. The greatest among 
the scientists, notably Lord Kelvin, Tyndall, Huxley, 
deny its possibility. Haeckel, however, seems to be as 
confident that organic matter did so originate as if he 
had been present when the thing was done. In his 
"Riddle" he says "The hypothesis of spontaneous genera- 
tion and the allied carbon-theory may be considered the 



52 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

chemical basis of life . . . First simple monera 
are formed by spontaneous generation, and from these 
arise unicellular protists . . . From these unicel- 
lular protists arise in the further course of evolution, 
first social cell-communities, and subsequently tissue 
forming plants and animals." 

But the concern here is with organic evolution only 
so far as it relates to the chief theme of this writing. 
The theory of organic evolution by natural selection as 
advanced by Darwin appears to have given the negation- 
ists a more confident scientific footing than they had 
before the time of Darwin. But what is the meaning 
of natural selection which is the chief factor in that 
method of evolution? 

Baldwin's Dictionary above cited thus defines it: "The 
theory that the struggle for life due to the rate of multi- 
plication of animals and plants and other conditions, 
results in the survival of those individuals having the 
most advantageous variations ; and thus leads by 
accumulation through a series of generations to evolu- 
tion." Under the title "Existence" it is said: "Three 
clearly distinguishable forms of struggle for existence 
may be distinguished. 

"(1) The competition for food, etc., that arises 
among organic beings through over production. 

"(2) Competition in any form of active contest in 
which individuals are pitted against one another. 

"(3) Survival due to greater fitness for life in a 
given environment, whether combined with direct com- 
petition with other organisms or not. 

"The second case (2) is that in which animals (a) 
fight with, or (b) prey upon, one another, only the 
former of these having any analogy to the form of com- 
petition due to a limited supply of food, etc.," 



EVOLUTION AND THE SOUL 53 

"The third case of 'struggle' (3) is that in which indi- 
viduals struggle against fate — the inorganic environment 
— not against one another. . . . The distinc- 
tion between cases (2) and (3) disappears in instances 
in which the animal accommodates actively to meet his 
enemies, which then become part of his environment, in 
the sense of case (3)." . . . 

"In recent evolution theory the doctrine of natural 
selection has come to rest more and more on the second 
and third sorts of struggle (2) and (3), and less on the 
Malthusian conception (1)" that is to say, more and 
more on the chances of survival in the struggle for a 
living (2) or the struggle against fate (3). And again 
under the title "Selection" : "Apart from sexual selec- 
tion, consciousness plays its part in the struggle for ex- 
istence among all the higher animals, though its effects 
are difficult to disentangle from those of unconscious 
selection." What the author means by the "conscious 
selection of the higher animals" we gather from the fol- 
lowing thus : "Here the effects are wrought through an 
appeal to the consciousness of the organism — though 
there is no purposive end in view, beyond, at most, 
immediate gratification," and "Where animals, for ex- 
ample, prey upon one another, consciousness as a factor 
cannot be excluded." This, of course, simply means 
organic desire, organic appetite, organic passion. 

Mr. Wallace in his "Darwinism" says that "The 
theory of natural selection rests on two main classes 
of facts which apply to all organized beings without 
exception, and which thus take rank as fundamental 
principles or laws. The first is, the power of rapid 
multiplication in a geometrical progression; the second, 
that the offspring always varies slightly from the 
parents, though generally very closely resembling them. 



54 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

From the first fact or law there follows, necessarily, 
a constant struggle for existence; because, while the 
offspring always exceed the parents in number, gen- 
erally to an enormous extent, yet the total number of 
living organisms in the world does not, and cannot, in- 
crease year by year. Consequently every year on the 
average, as many die as are being born, plants as well 
as animals; and the majority die premature deaths. They 
kill each other in a thousand different ways; they starve 
each other by some consuming the food that others 
want ; they are destroyed largely by the powers of nature 
— by cold and heat, by rain and storm, by flood and fire. 
There is thus a perpetual struggle among them which 
shall live and which shall die; and this struggle is tre- 
mendously severe because so few can possibly remain 
alive — one in five, one in ten, often only one in a hun- 
dred or even one in a thousand." Now, in the very 
nature of things, this struggle for existence — the enor- 
mous destruction on the one hand and the survival 
of the few on the other, does not proceed upon any 
"fundamental principle or law." In another place after 
writing "On the Advance of Organization by Natural 
Selection" the author says: "but this remarkable ad- 
vance in the higher and larger groups does not imply 
any universal law of progress in organisation (italics by 
the present writer) because we have at the same time 
numerous examples (as has already been pointed out), 
of the persistence of the lowly organized forms, and 
also of absolute degradation or degeneration." 

Mr. Lock in his book on "Recent Progress in the 
Study of Variation, Heredity, and Evolution," 1906, 
says: "Selection whether natural or artificial, can indeed 
of itself have no power in the direction of creating any- 
thing new; its influence is destructive or preservative, 



EVOLUTION AND THE SOUL 55 

but nothing more than this." But enough of this. 
Enough has been quoted from writers of generally 
recognized authority, to show that the Darwinian theory 
of evolution by natural selection does not mean progres- 
sive development in accordance with fundamental law — 
with orderly y purposive, cosmic al law. 

If, then, in the Darwinian scheme of evolution, prog- 
ressive development is chiefly — as some maintain wholly 
(Lockante) — due to natural selection; and if natural 
selection has not proceeded according to fundamental 
cosmic law, uniform and orderly in operation, is it not 
fair to say that what it amounts to is, that in the lot- 
tery-wheel of natural events — the vast and varied 
changes of environment which have transpired over land 
and sea since the time when the "earth was without 
form and void" — John Fiske's "finished product" was 
the creature of accident; that it is due to a fortunate 
series of accidents that he did not turn out to be some 
other and entirely different animal. Truly, if during all 
the infinite eons prior to the advent of man, there could 
have existed an intelligent looker-on in the work-shop 
of nature, there would have prevailed a feeling of un- 
crtainty whether such a creature as man would ever 
have come into existence at all. 

But there were "breaks" of continuity in the evolu- 
tionary process which the Darwinians could not account 
for, and which Mr. Darwin conceded presented difficul- 
ties in the way of its universal acceptance which could 
not be overcome except upon the supposition that the 
geological record is imperfectly known; and while it 
is true, as stated by Mr. Wallace in his "Darwinism," 
that the geological record and other data are now more 
accessible than they were to Mr. Darwin, it is still true 
that there are "breaks" which eminent scientists contend 



56 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

never can be filled by the theory of natural selection. 
Huxley, as stated in Baldwin's Dictionary, "was never 
completely convinced of the efficacy of natural selec- 
tion" for reasons briefly given under that title. As long 
ago as June, 1859, he wrote to his friend, Sir Charles 
Lyell (Life and Letter by his son,) that "The fixity and 
definite limitations of species, genera, and large groups 
appear to me to be perfectly consistent with the theory 
of transmutation. In other words, I think transmutation 
may take place without transition." . . . "All my 
studies lead me to believe more and more in the absence 
of any real transitions between natural groups, great and 
small — but with what we know of the physiology of 
conditions this opinion seems to me to be quite consist- 
ent with transmutation." ... "I by no means sup- 
pose that the transmutation hypothesis is proven or any- 
thing like it. But I view it as a powerful instrument of 
research. Follow it out, and it will lead us some- 
where; while the other notion is like all modifications of 
final causation, a barren virgin." Again, in 1894, in 
writing to Mr. Bateson, who holds that species may 
originate by a single variation — a single step — he said: 
"I see you are inclined to advocate the possibility of con- 
siderable 'Saltus' on the part of Dame Nature in her 
variations. I always took the same view, much to Mr. 
Darwin's disgust, and we used often to debate it." And 
Professor LeConte, without being an avowed mutation- 
ist, in his book above cited said: "Causes or forces are 
consistent but phonemena everywhere and in every de- 
partment of nature are paroxysmal/' 

The theory of evolution thus foreshadowed, known 
as the Mutation theory, which discards the influence of 
external and fortuitous conditions in the production of 
species, and according to which a fully "co-ordinated set 



EVOLUTION AND THE SOUL 57 

of structures can and does arise in an already perfected 
condition at a single step, and that such phonemena take 
place with sufficient frequency to give ample opportunity 
for the survival of the new types so arising" (Lock, in 
the book above cited) appears to be supplanting the 
theory of evolution by natural selection. "Trivial vari- 
ants are not the only ones that play a role in evolution. 
De Vries (1901) has gone to the extent of denying that 
trivial variations have any part in the origin of species." 
(Baldwin's Dictionary, title Variation.) And again in 
the same work under the title Mutation, it is said: "De 
Vries' views are thus directly opposed to the common 
form of the theory of evolution." . . . "De Vries' 
experiments support the results arrived at by Scott and 
other paleontologists that there is no evidence in the 
successive strata of the earth of a gradual development 
of one species into another and that everything points 
at small, but sudden transitions." Certainly the vast and 
transcendent changes from the inorganic to the vege- 
table, and from the vegetable to the animal, and from the 
animal to man, cannot be accounted for on the theory of 
natural selection. Whatever may be the function of 
natural selection in the production of varieties of the 
same species, and in preventing the destruction of species 
by the numerous adverse conditions, and especially by 
an excessive multiplication of animal life beyond the 
means of living, it seems to be fairly shown that the 
production of species is not due to external and fortuit- 
ous conditions but to the operation of fundamental cos- 
mic law which produced organisms in the first place, and 
by subsequent distinct and specific acts of variation and 
heredity. However and whatever the causes by which 
sudden and discontinuous variations are operative, 
whether or no in the germ-cells, it is enough for the 



58 . IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

present purpose that they are internal and organic. 

On first blush the introduction of the subject of 
evolution in considering the theme to which this essay- 
is chiefly devoted, may not appear relevant. With def- 
erence to the many devout men of science who have 
persuaded themselves that they can see the hand of 
God in the theory of evolution as maintained by the 
Darwinians, and who hold that it is consistent with the 
idea that man is endowed with a substantial spiritual 
entity capable of perpetual existence in another life, its 
tendency does seem to cast serious doubt upon the 
probability of a future state of existence. It certainly 
places all animal life, including man, upon a dead level 
as to origin and mode of physical development; but 
since there is a general consensus of belief among its 
advocates, that man's spiritual nature is the product of 
the same evolutionary process which produced his phy- 
sical frame, and that his spiritual nature is the same 
in kind as that of the lower animals, and that the moral 
element in his spiritual nature differs only in degree from 
that of animals, it is in effect held that his bodily death 
is the finality of his existence. Upon this theory wherein 
is there any greater reason to believe that the spirit 
of man will survive mortality, than that his body will 
be revived to eternal life? 

On the other hand, in the theory of evolution by 
virtue of the cumulative effect and sudden progressive 
stages of development by internal vital forces unin- 
fluenced by, and independent of environment and natural 
selection, whereby higher planes of existence are attained, 
we have a clearer conception that each stage of progres- 
sive development is due to cosmic law wearing the aspect 
of Omniscient design ; every stage presaging the epochal 
event of the appearance of a being who for the first time 



EVOLUTION AND THE SOUL 59 

in biological history, possessed mental as distinguished 
from organic consciousness, and endowed with the 
faculty of discerning moral distinctions, the radical dif- 
ference between the morally right and the morally 
wrong. In this last transcendent mutation, an entirely 
new plane of existence was reached. The highest phy- 
sical development was attained when the animal became 
erect with a great dome of brain surmounting the phy- 
sical structure. This supreme physical structure for the 
first time became an appropriate organism for the in- 
carnation of the new self-conscious, rationalizing being. 

In the vast and sudden mutation from the lower to 
the higher stages of development which have gone be- 
fore, we have the reason and analogy that in the arrest 
of development of the physical man, and the continuing 
development of his intellectual and moral nature, when 
this fleshy and decaying cerement falls away, there will 
occur a transcendent spiritual mutation to a higher plane 
of existence beyond the limitations of mortality. 

If the history of the mutation from the anthropoid to 
man fills the mind with an oppressive sense of intellec- 
tual helplessness, it is, after all, no greater than the 
mutation in some sense repeated in the life of every in- 
dividual man. This individual mutation, perhaps better 
serves as an illustration than as a complete analogy, 
since it is not the origin of a new species. It is the re- 
newal and perpetuity of a species which has been fixed 
time beyond the history recorded in silt and cave. 
The mightiest of earth begins his career in a little, 
rounded protoplasmic cell scarcely perceptible, if at all, 
to natural vision. And we have the great authority of 
Huxley for saying that, "not only men, 'and horses, and 
cats and dogs, lobsters and beetles, periwinkles and 
muscles, but even the very sponges and animalcules 



60 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

commence their existence under forms which are essen- 
tially undistinguishable." 

What is it that always, everywhere, under all condi- 
tions in a short time transcendently differentiates the 
microscopical germ cell issuing from the human matrix, 
from the germ cell of "cats and dogs, lobsters and 
beetles"? Whence comes it but from the cosmic law in 
which Almighty God is ever immanent? 

In this new cell, thus formed by the fusion of the 
two sexual cells, there is as distinctly the beginning of a 
new being physically and spiritually, and as marvelous, 
and a priori as incredible, as the legend in the book of 
Genesis wherein it is related that God said "let us make 
man in our own image, after our likeness/' According 
to recent biological revelations it is now made apparent 
that in the nuclei of these cells there are minute bodies 
distinguished by a jaw-breaking terminology invisible 
except through a microscope of high magnifying power, 
which bear the composite heredity of the two ancestral 
lines. This was the microscopic genesis of the mighty 
genius who wrote Hamlet and Mid Summer Night's 
Dream. And yet the eminent Professor Haeckel would 
see in this nothing more than a "chemical compound of 
carbon" — just a common-place "physico-chemical pro- 
cess," and a duration of existence and destiny as trivial, 
and compared with the everlasting, as transient as that 
of the "fly of the summer's day," or the green scum of 
a stagnant pond. What extravagance of crudulous in- 
credulity is the negative man of science not capable of 
in his reaction against the "superstition" of belief in 
God and the eternal duration of the spirit of man ! 

And now a marvelous change takes place; a sudden 
mutative change from the latent and inert to active 
vitality. The energy of a new life is manifested. There 



EVOLUTION AND THE SOUL 61 

is distinctly the appearance and beginning of development 
of a new being — a being which had not existed in pos- 
sibility as long as these sexual cells remain separate. 
In the fusion each cell contributes a mysterious some- 
thing essential to constitute the life of the new being. 
And not only does a new being begin to live, but there is 
the beginning in that new personality of a new mentality 
like in kind the mentality of other but distinctly individ- 
ual human beings. 

On the completion of fetal life there occurs a par- 
oxysmal birth into a new mode of existence wholly un- 
like intra-uterine life. Whereas, while dwelling in the 
world of waters, the inspiration of air would cause the 
fetus to drown, on the instant of birth the lungs must 
have atmospheric air or the young life would instantly 
end. The mode of nutrition is instantly and entirely 
changed. One moment, life depends upon the blood of 
the mother; the next moment life must be sustained 
by nutrition derived through the alimentary apparatus. 
Really, are not these sudden changes as distinctly and 
marvelously mutative as the physical mutation from the 
anthropoid ape long ago extinct to man ? 



62 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 



VIII 

IDEATIONAL PROCESSES — "UNC 

It is a contention of psychologists that ideas never re- 
cur as originally conceived. This tends to corroborate 
the theory that they originate in a something independent 
of physical substance. Ideas are not subjects. They are 
only phenomenal manifestations of something that thinks. 
That something must be a continuing permanent entity 
in which ideas not only originate, but retain the sub- 
stance of what has been thought, and which possesses 
the power of reproducing similar ideas. It is clear that 
that something possesses the power of discrimination be- 
tween the true and the false, of selecting out the material 
from the immaterial, the relevant from the irrelevant; 
possesses the power of testing propositions, problems, hy- 
potheses, by rules of logic and probabilities, the capacity 
to increase and develop by internal volitional and spon- 
taneous ideation after the withdrawal or cessation of 
inciting causes. If thinking were a physical process it 
would seem that these phenomena could not occur in so 
many varied forms, and that ideas would recur precisely 
as first received. Ideation would be mechanical and in- 
flexible. Upon the physical hypothesis, one naturally in- 
quires what it is that feels the various emotions which 
occur in human experience? What it is that feels pleas- 
ure on performing a virtuous action? One can under- 
stand very well what physical comfort is when one is 



IDEATIONAL PROCESSES 63 

free from pain, when hunger is appeased, when digestion 
is healthy, when sleep is normal, when all reasonable 
physical wants are supplied. But what is it that feels 
happiness, joy, in the performance of good deeds, or 
in witnessing the benevolent, humane, or philanthropic 
conduct of others? Is it the cortex, the grey matter, of 
the brain? Or is it the sensory ganglia generally? Or 
is it an all-pervading sensation of the sympathetic system 
of nerves? Is it that tissue is gratified? We can under- 
stand what physical discomfort is. We can understand 
that an inflamed nerve will cause a tooth to ache; that 
a diseased nerve will cause neuralgia or sciatica. But 
where is the seat of the pain caused by a wicked action ; 
of the distress caused by witnessing or hearing of the 
cruelty inflicted by others? The seat of grief? Of 
remorse? These feelings and emotions must reside in 
or spring out of something and indicate more than trans- 
cient phenomena ; for they often endure for years, some- 
times for life, without a repetition of the original cause. 
If there is nothing but the physical it must be that 
organic matter is the seat of these sensations. It must 
be that organic matter feels remorse for having per- 
formed a mean or cruel deed, or grief or distress on 
seeing the misfortune of others. 

Arguing inferentially from the effect of abnormal 
conditions of certain parts or organs that mentality 
is due to chemico-physiological processes occurring in 
such parts or organs, it is hardly too much to say that 
the negationists would find as much support in patho- 
logical conditions of the thyroid gland, a small ductless 
gland situated in front of the trachea as from anything 
that may be observed in disordered conditions of the 
brain. The mental and physical effects following upon 
the atrophy or excision of that gland cannot be better 



64 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

stated than by Professor Du Bois, in his little mono- 
graph on "The influence of the Mind on the Body." 
"A typical example of this action of the body upon the 
mind is furnished to us by the destruction of the thyroid 
gland. In other times in operations for goiter, which 
have become so frequent to-day, the whole gland was 
removed, upon the pretext that it was useless. It has 
become necessary to retract this opinion. It has happened 
that people who were normal before have fallen after 
the operation into a state of imbecility. Not only are 
the features swollen, the forehead wrinkled, the lips 
heavy, the face even taking a senile look; but the intel- 
ligence has suffered and the patient has fallen into a 
state of intellectual torpor. The same conditions can 
occur without an operation by the atrophy of the thyroid 
gland. 

"Now in both cases we can give back to the patient his 
intelligence, his vivacity of spirit, by making him eat 
the thyroid gland of the sheep or take pills made of the 
extract of that gland! We can plunge him again into 
idiocy by stopping his pills and render him intelligent 
anew by giving him a prescription to the chemist." No 
more remarkable physical and intellectual effects are to 
be observed in disorders of that part of the brain gen- 
erally thought to be the seat of mentality. And is it 
too far fetched to say that there is as much evidence in 
this degenerative and regenerative process connected 
with pathological conditions of the thyroid gland to sup- 
port the materialistic theory that mental phenomena are 
due to chemico-physiological activity occurring in that 
gland, as that it is due to such activity occurring in the 
cerebrum ? 



UNCONSCIOUS CEREBRATION 65 



IX 

UNCONSCIOUS CEREBRATION. 

"Unconscious Cerebration," a term used by Profes- 
sor Carpenter in his book on "Mental Physiology/' is 
an important factor in considering the probability of the 
existence of a separate soul personality. It is well 
authenticated that higher reaches of the purely intel- 
lectual have been attained subconsciously in notable in- 
dividual instances, than the same individual has been 
capable of by conscious effort. It is a not uncommon ex- 
perience that the mind seems to act unconsciously, as, 
for instance, when one has for a time been considering 
a question of difficulty, and having given it up as un- 
solved, or unsolvable, has suddenly been surprised, in 
the midst of thought upon an entirely different subject, 
by a clear revelation of what has before been sought in 
vain. Professor Carpenter, in his book, thus quotes 
from Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, eminent in philos- 
ophy, poetry, and science, as writing in his book on 
"Mechanism in Thought and Morals:" "I question 
whether persons who think most — that is, have most 
conscious thought pass through their minds — necessarily 
do most mental work. The tree you are stick- 
ing in 'will be growing while you are sleeping.' 
So with every idea that is planted in a real thinker's 
mind: it will be growing when he is least conscious 
of it. An idea in the brain is not a legend carved 



66 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

on a marble slab: it is an impression made on liv- 
ing tissue, which is the seat of active nutritive pro- 
cesses. Shall the initials I carved in bark increase from 
year to year with the tree? And shall not my recorded 
thought develop into new forms and relations with my 
growing brain ?" 

"Our definite ideas are stepping-stones; how we get 
from one to the other, we do not know : something carries 
us; we (i. e. our conscious selves) do not take the step. 

A creating and informing spirit, which is with us, 
and not of us, is recognized everywhere in real and 
stoned life; ... it comes to the least of us as a 
voice that will be heard ; it tells us what we must believe ; 
it frames our sentences; it lends a sudden gleam of 
sense or eloquence to the dullest of us all; we wonder 
at ourselves, or rather not at ourselves, but at this divine 
visitor, who chooses our brain as his dwelling-place, and 
invests our naked thought with the purple of the kings 
of speech or song." Sir William Hamilton, the great 
metaphysician of Edinburgh, is quoted as having said in 
one of his lectures: "I do not hesitate to affirm that 
what we are conscious of is constructed out of what 
we are not conscious of." 

Many illustrative instances are cited by Professor 
Carpenter, among the more notable are here quoted. In 
a letter to a friend, Sir Rowan Hamilton wrote : 

"To-morrow will be the fifteenth birthday of Quater- 
nions. They started into life, or light, full-grown, on the 
sixteenth of October, 1843, as I was walking with Lady 
Hamilton to Dublin, and came up to Brougham Bridge. 
That is to say, I then and there felt the galvanic circuit 
of thought close; and the sparks which fell from it 
were the fundamental equations between i, j, k, exactly 



UNCONSCIOUS CEREBRATION 67 

such as I have used them ever since, I pulled out on the 
spot, a pocket-book, which still exists, and made an 
entry, on which at the very moment, I felt that it might 
bte worth my while to expend the labor of at least ten 
(or it might be fifteen) years to come. But then it is 
fair to say that this was because I felt a problem to have 
been at that moment solved — an intellectual want re- 
lieved — which had haunted me for at least fifteen years 
before." 

The following instances were communicated to the 
author by the gentleman in whose experience they 
occurred : 

"When at school, I was fond of trying my hand at 
geometrical problems. One baffled me. . . . Some 
years after, and when the problem had not been touched 
by me for some time, I had been sitting up till the small 
hours, deciphering a cryptograph for one of my pupils. 
Exulting in the successful solution, I turned into bed; 
and suddenly there flashed across my mind the secret 
of the solution of the problem I had so long vainly dealt 
with. . . . The effect on me was strange, I trembled 
as if in the presence of another being who had com- 
municated the secret to me. 

"Another time, an algebraic sum had plagued me for 
a day or two. I could not get the desired result. Some 
weeks after, on returning from a social gathering, I re- 
tired, thinking of the pleasant evening I had spent ; when 
suddenly it flashed across me that there was an error 
in the sum as set. I leaped out of bed with the same 
mysterious feeling upon me, wrote down the involved 
expression with the suggested correction, worked the 
sum, and obtained the desired result. Strange to say, 
some weeks afterwards I took the sum from the book, 
but could not discover what change should be made ; and 



68 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

it was not until I found the scrap of paper upon which 
I had worked it that night, that I could correct the sum 
in the book." These examples are almost startling in- 
stances of the repeated failure to solve difficult problems 
by conscious effort and their involuntary solution by 
"unconscions cerebration." 

But what is most remarkable is the action of mind 
in difficult and coherent processes of rationalizing, and 
the inconceivable rapidity with which "long trains of 
thought" pass through the mind in dreaming, when the 
functions of the physical senses and volition are sus- 
pended in the unconsciousness of sleep. 

Dr. Carpenter cites the famous case of the composi- 
tion of the poetical fragment "Kubla Kahn" by Coleridge 
while asleep; and quotes from Dr. Abercrombie's work 
on the "Intellectual Powers," the case of a distinguished 
Scotish lawyer: 

"This eminent person had been consulted respecting 
a case of great importance and much difficulty; and he 
had been studying it with intense anxiety and attention. 
After several days had been occupied in this manner, he 
was observed by his wife to rise from his bed in the 
night, and go to a writing desk which stood in his bed- 
room. He then sat down, and wrote a long paper which 
he carefully put by in his desk and returned to bed. The 
following morning he told his wife that he had had a 
most interesting dream — that he had dreamed of deliver- 
ing a clear and luminous opinion respecting a case which 
had exceedingly perplexed him; and that he would give 
anything to recover the train of thought which had 
passed before him in his dream. She then directed him 
to the writing desk where he found the opinion clearly 
and fully written out; and this was afterward found to 
be perfectly correct." 



UNCONSCIOUS CEREBRATION 69 

In the "Library of Universal Knowledge," (American 
Edition of "Chambers' Encyclopedia") title dreaming, 
instances are related of the rapidity of mental action in 
sleep. "A dream requiring hours for its accomplish- 
ment, is begun and terminated in a few seconds. A per- 
son who was suddenly aroused from sleep by a few drops 
of water sprinkled in his face, dreamed of the events 
of an entire life in which happiness and sorrow were 
mingled, and which finally terminated with an alterca- 
tion upon the borders of an extensive lake, in which his 
exasperated companion, after a considerable struggle, 
succeeded in plunging him. Dr. Abercrombie relates 
a similar case of a gentleman, who dreamed that he had 
enlisted as a soldier, joined his regiment, deserted, was 
apprehended, carried back, tried, condemned to be shot, 
and at last led out for execution. After all the usual 
preparations, a gun was fired; he awoke with the 
report, and found that a noise in an adjoining room had 
both produced the dream and aroused him from sleep. 
Sir Benjamin Brodie, in his Psychological Inquiries 
(1854), mentions the following anecdote of the late 
Lord Holland: "On an occasion when he was much 
fatigued, while listening to a friend who was reading 
aloud, he fell asleep and had a dream, the particulars 
of which it would have occupied him a quarter of an 
hour or longer to express in writing. After he awoke, 
he remembered the beginning of one sentence, while 
he actually heard the latter part of the sentence im- 
mediately following it, so that probably the whole time 
during which he had slept, did not occupy more than a 
few seconds." Many facts of the same kind are on 
record. It is from cases of this nature that Lord Broug- 
ham has been led to the opinion that all our dreams 
really take place in the act of falling asleep or of awaking. 



70 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

In the cases above related, it would seem absurd to 
attribute mental activity to chemico-physiological pro- 
cesses. If in waking life it may seem possible with some 
show of reason, from the standpoint of the materialist, 
to assume that rationalizing is the product of chemico- 
physiological action stimulated by conscious direction 
through the nervous system, and possibly to attribute 
the sudden and unexpected solution of difficult mental 
problems, to the remote association of ideas, there can 
be no ground for such assumption when such mental 
action occurs in sleep. 



MEMORY 71 



X 



MEMORY — BRIGHTEST AS THE PHYSICAL FAILS 



The most important attribute of the mind is memory; 
and no mental attribute so significantly distinguishes man 
from animals, nor so significantly differentiates the 
psychic and the physical. It is by memory that knowl- 
edge which has been acquired through the senses, or by 
subjective ideation, is held fast in intellectual subcon- 
sciousness to be recalled at will, or to recur spontane- 
ously as one may desire to think about, and reflect upon 
it, to utilize it. There can be no mental acquisition 
without it. The present is but an instant. In an instant 
the present becomes the past; and so without memory 
the instant of the recognition of a fact, or of subjective 
spontaneous thought, would be the instant of its final 
disappearance from consciousness. 

What is it that remembers? In what condition, or 
state of existence, are ideas during the time that they are 
beneath the state or condition of consciousness? For 
it is certain that they must inhere or be contained in 
something, else they could not be recalled to conscious- 
ness. Being processes they cannot be retained in the 
cerebral cells as pure abstractions. Phenomena cannot 
think. They cannot remember. It is the something that 



72 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

produces thought that thinks; that is the something that 
remembers. Haeckel in his "Riddle" says: "memory is 
the work of certain cerebral cells in man and in ani- 
mals." This is Haeckel's physiological materialism. But 
how do the cerebral cells "work" ? The term "work," as 
used by Haeckel, embraces the whole process of spon- 
taneous subjective ideation, and the intellectual percep- 
tion of what comes to these cells from the external 
world through the telegraphic nervous system. This 
hypothesis means that the brain cells which constitute 
the mass of the tissue of the brain, do the "work" of 
independent, original, abstract, ideation, often of the 
most difficult and abstruse character, without stimula- 
tion received through the organs of sense, and the retain- 
ing of the ideas thus originating, by registration in these 
cells in some manner impossible to conceive; and also 
the mechanical registering of the thoughts of others 
which have been memorized in youth, and the power to 
literally repeat the same when this brain tissue is shrivel- 
ing and decaying with old age. When the assimilation 
which means growth in youth, and is equal to disintegra- 
tion in the full fruition of mature life, is giving way to 
the decline which ends in the general physical decrepi- 
tude of advanced age, it is often seen that memory recalls 
with startling minuteness the trivial events of childhood. 
Why is it that the "register" is thus preserved while all 
else is giving way to decay? These cells must be sub- 
ject to the physiological laws of nutrition and excre- 
tion which, as has been seen, change the old for the 
new. It is purely a physical process — chemico-physio- 
logical in character. 

On the theory that the physical is endowed with soul 
personality, that the physical incarnates the spiritual 
entity, it is withal true that the only means of communi- 



MEMORY 73 

cation this spiritual entity has with the external world 
is by means of the physical organs of sense, constantly 
subject to varying and often injurious conditions and 
imperfections. The physical is the vehicle, the containing 
medium, and so, as the containing physical organism 
becomes infirm from disease, or decays by reason of 
old age, it must be true that recent mental experiences 
are less impressive, the acquisition of new ideas more 
difficult. On the other hand when the means of com- 
munication with the external world are in healthful and 
normal condition, and internal, subjective ideation is 
least clouded and encumbered by the physical embodi- 
ment, mental experiences are more vivid and lasting, 
and, as is often observed in old age the experiences of 
the earlier years recur in minutest detail. 

That the mental experiences of an entire life have 
been known to be reproduced with the utmost and 
minutest distinctness in not many seconds of time as the 
consciousness of physical existence ceases, as in the in- 
stances when resucitation has occurred after the very 
near approach of death, forcibly illustrate and confirm 
the theory that memory is not a physiological or other 
material function, but is always more or less condi- 
tioned by the physical organization. 

The following remarkable instance, quoted by Dr. 
Maudsley in his "Physiology of Mind," from a letter 
of Rear-Admiral Sir F. Beaufort to Dr. Wollaston, re- 
lating his personal experience on being drowned, is 
very much in point: 

"From the moment that all exertion had ceased — 
which I imagine was the immediate consequence of com- 
plete suffocation — a calm feeling of the most perfect 
tranquility superseded the previous tumultuous sensa- 
tions ; it might be called apathy, certainly not resignation, 



74 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

for drowning no longer appeared to be an evil. I no 
longer thought of being rescued, nor was I in any bodily 
pain. On the contrary my sensations were now rather 
of a pleasant cast, partaking of the dull but contented 
sort of feeling which precedes the sleep produced by 
fatigue. Though the senses were thus deadened, not 
so the mind; its activity seemed to the invigorated in a 
ratio which defies all description, for thought rose above 
thought with a rapidity of succession that is not only 
indescribable, but probably inconceivable by anyone who 
has not been in a similar situation. The course of these 
thoughts I can even now in a great measure retrace — 
the event which had just taken place — the awkwardness 
that had produced it, the bustle it had occasioned, the 
effect it would have on a most affectionate father, the 
manner in which he would disclose it to the rest of the 
family, and a thousand other circumstances minutely 
associated with home, were the first series of reflections 
that occurred. They took then a wider range, our last 
cruise, a former voyage and shipwreck, my school, the 
progress I had made there, and the time I had misspent, 
and even all my boyish pursuits and adventures. Thus 
traveling backwards, every past incident of my life 
seemed to glance across my recollection in retrograde 
succession; not, however, in mere outline and collateral 
feature. In short, the whole period of my existence 
seemed to be placed before me in a kind of panoramic 
review, and each act of it seemed to be accompanied 
by a consciousness of right and wrong, or by some re- 
flection on its cause or its consequences; indeed many 
trifling events which had long been, forgotten, then 
crowded into my imagination, and with the character 
of recent familiarity. . . . The length of time that 
was occupied with this deluge of ideas, or rather short- 



MEMORY 75 

ness of time into which they were condensed, I cannot 
now state with precision; yet certainly two minutes 
could not have elasped from the moment of suffocation 
to the time of my being hauled up. De Quincey in his 
essay on the Palmpsest, wherein he speaks of the human 
brain as a "natural and mighty palmpsest" relates a simi- 
lar instance. 

Here we have perfectly credible and forcible illustra- 
tion and confirmation of the fact that when the func- 
tions of animal life are almost entirely suspended, mem- 
ory flashes out of the recesses of the soul all the in- 
cidents and experiences of life with infinity of detail, as 
photography reveals the invisible stars out of the black 
abysses of the sky. 

To the same purport is the case which Professor 
Carpenter deems sufficiently credible to be quoted 
out of "Household Words"' (Vol. 9), in his "Mental 
Physiology" : 

"A remarkable case is mentioned by a writer (Miss 
H. Martineau?), of a congenital idiot who had lost 
his mother when he was under two years old, and who 
could not have subsequently been made cognizant of 
anything relating to her; and who yet, when dying at 
the age of thirty, suddenly turned his head, looked bright 
and sensible, and exclaimed in a tone never heard from 
him before, 'Oh, my mother! How beautiful!' and 
sunk round again — dead." 

Neither the physiological materialists, nor any other 
sect of materialists, have a plausible hypothesis for the 
explanation of how it is that we remember things that 
do not happen. There can hardly be registered or "re- 
corded" in the cortex of the cerebrum, or in the cerebral 
cells, something that does not occur; as for instance, 
that an appointment has not been kept that was made, 



76 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

or that something has been forgotten that was intended 
to be done, or ought to have been done. It cannot be 
contended that a register is made of an omission, and 
yet there is an after remembrance of the omission, or of 
the fact that something was not done. 



MEMORY OF ASSOCIATION 77 



XI 

MEMORY OF ASSOCIATION — RECOGNITION 

If it be said that animals as well as man have memory 
and that, therefore, memory cannot be taken to have 
much force as evidence of soul personality in man any 
more than in animals, it is to be replied that there is 
a clear distinction between intellectual memory — the 
memory of ideas — and the memory of association. 

Man has a remembrance of what has been thought, 
and a remembrance of objects once perceived by the 
bodily organs of sense in the absence of the object. 
This cannot be said of animals. There is no satisfactory 
evidence that animals possess the power of ideation; 
that they think and afterward recollect what they 
thought; or that they retain mental images of objects. 
But it seems certain that whatever may be the psychic 
states of animals analogous to true memory may be 
referred exclusively to association. 

For the purpose of this writing association may be 
best defined by illustration, and association in simplest 
and plainest form. Association even in man, has really 
much more to do with influencing action than rational- 
izing, and in animals is the only form of memory. Rec- 
ognition in the case of animals is the better term. The 
memory of association in man in its various forms and 
phenomena, are exceedingly complex, insomuch that as 



78 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

said by Wundt in his ''Human and Animal Psychology," 
"Association gives rise to actions whose result is equiv- 
alent to that due to the operation of the intellectual func- 
tions." A consideration in detail of the reasons which 
prevail with some of the most eminent psychologists in 
determining that animals are influenced solely by the 
memory of association, though they may not present 
the subject in just these terms, cannot be entered into 
here. Only general conclusions can be given. 

Examples of association experiences in simplest form 
in man are taken from Professor James' work on 
"Psychology." The following from his own personal 
experience we quote : "Thus for instance after looking 
at my clock just now (1879), I found myself thinking 
of a recent resolution of the Senate about our legal 
tender notes. The clock called up the image of the man 
who had repaired its gong. He suggested the jeweler's 
shop where I had last seen him; that shop, some shirt 
studs which I had bought there; they, the value of gold 
and its recent decline; the latter, the equal value of 
greenbacks, and this, naturally, the question of how long 
they were to last, and of the Bayard proposition." 

He gives another example from the "Leviathan" of 
Thomas Hobbes published in 1651. "In a discourse on 
our present Civil War, what could seem more imperti- 
nent than to ask (as one did) what was the value of 
a Roman penny? Yet the coherence to me was mani- 
fest enough. For the thought of the war introduced 
the delivering up of the King to his enemies ; the thought 
of that brought in the thought of the delivering up of 
Christ; and that again the thought of the thirty pence, 
which was the price of the treason; and thence easily 
followed that malicious question; and all this in a mo- 
ment of time; for thought is quick." 



MEMORY OF ASSOCIATION 79 

In the case of animals it is not probable that asso- 
ciation is carried to the extent of involving relations and 
connections as far reaching as in the instances here 
given, and which are of constant occurrance in the ex- 
perience of man. 

What has been observed by Professor Wundt, whom 
Haeckel says is regarded in Germany as the most emi- 
nent Psychologist living, — in his book above cited on 
the subject of association in man and animals, is so 
much in point that coming with the force of his great 
authority, it is deemed in place to quote what he says 
somewhat at large: 

"It is here, therefore, in the various forms of suc- 
cessive association proper, that the act of interpretation 
which resolves the mental life of animals into concepts, 
judgments, and inferences, according to all the rules of 
logic, finds freest play. But if the whole body of reliable 
observation is carefully tested, and due regard is paid 
to the lex parsimoniae, which only allows recourse to be 
had to complex principles of explanation when the sim- 
pler ones have proved inadequate, it seems that the entire 
intellectual life of animals can be accounted for on the 
simple laws of association. Nowhere do we find the 
characteristic marks of a true reflection, of any active 
functioning of imagination or understanding. In saying 
this, we are, of course, regarding only well-authenticated 
facts, and not those 'travelers' tales' of which animal 
psychology has as many as it has wrong explanations 
of actual observations." 

The memory of association in animals is the asso- 
ciation of time or place and must be related to or con- 
nected with objects or conditions which by recurrence 
have become more or less familiarized. 

And again Professor Wundt : "In very many animals 



80 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

the development of the organs of speech has gone far 
enough to enable them to clothe thought in words, if 
the thought were there to clothe. The question why 
animals do not talk is most correctly answered in the 
old way: Because they have nothing to say." 

"Indeed, the importance of association for the animal 
consciousness recalls what we have already said of its 
value for the human mind. When we began our con- 
sideration of the mental life of animals, we condemned 
the tendency of animal psychology to translate every 
manifestation of 'intelligence' into an intellectual opera- 
tion. The same reproach could be made against certain 
more or less popular views of our own mentality. The 
old metaphysical prejudice that man 'always thinks' has 
not yet entirely disappeared. I myself am inclined to 
hold that man thinks very little and very seldom. . . . 
Besides this, man is constantly translating acts of logical 
thought back again into customary associations, and so 
increasing the sphere and the intellectual consequences 
of the associational processes. By practice we can re- 
duce anything to association." 

But this does not mean so great a disparagement of 
the human intellect as upon first blush appears. It indi- 
cates simply the non-user in the ordinary daily life of 
even the most enlightened of mankind, of the higher 
intellectual power of original thinking. 



FREEDOM OF THE WILL 81 



XII 

FREEDOM OF THE WILL FATALISM 

One of the strongest evidences of soul personality is 
intellectual and moral freedom, though, to be sure, in a 
sense, intellectual and moral freedom mean the same 
thing. 

In common parlance this is freedom of the will. It 
seems self-evident that without this freedom man would 
be an automatic machine. It is a fundamental principle 
in the criminal codes of all enlightened nations that there 
can be no responsibility for acts considered criminal, 
when the power of the will — the freedom of the will — 
is suspended. If there is any proposition in psychology 
to which one would anticipate immediate and universal 
assent as an original and necessary postulate, it is that of 
freedom. No proposition would on introspection and 
personal experience seem to be clearer. 

But here again we are met by the fatalism of the 
atheistic monists and the physiological materialists. In 
the realm of the psychical in man, as well as animals, 
they assume as a postulate not to be disputed, that what 
is commonly understood and universally felt to be the 
power of free choice, is an "illusion of ignorant 'common 
sense' which, like the vulgar belief that the sun moves 
round the earth, is utterly dispelled by the light of rea- 
son." It being assumed that man's mental and moral 
nature is the sum-total expression of all the influences, 



82 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

heritable, physiological, environmental, which enter into 
its constitution, it is as much organic as his physical 
structure, and indeed a part of it; and that could we 
well know the nature of the causes which have entered 
into the formation of the character of the individual, 
we could as certainly predict what the individual would 
do in any given situation as we can predict the conse- 
quences of the action of any mechanical force. 

The original fiber of physical character transmitted 
by heredity may be weak and flabby, or strong and virile, 
depending largely on the degree of prepotency of an- 
cestors. This fiber may be strengthened or weakened by 
individual environment and habits acquired by personal 
experiences, and so the will, largely influenced by the 
physical, may be weak and flabby or strong and reso- 
lute, but the element of freedom is always present in 
consciousness in greater or less degree. It is true that 
it may be said that the elements entering into the for- 
mation of character bear the relation to choice of cause 
and effect, but it is moral cause, moral influence, and 
not in the sense that effect is contained in the cause 
as in logic or physics. It is cause in the sense that 
predominant motive is a cause, i. e., which may be the 
variable result of appetite or passion, or greed, or per- 
sonal advantage of some sort or other, or by the highest 
consideration of what ought to be morally or intellec- 
tually. But all the while there is present the conscious- 
ness that something different might have been done ; and 
often on the very threshold of performance some slight 
reflection or incident changes the course of conduct. 
History illustrates that the course or fate of empires 
has turned upon incidents almost as trivial or whimsical 
as the turning of the hand. No theorizing in support 
of the dogma of determinism, either theological or phys- 



FREEDOM OF THE WILL 83 

ical, can have weight against the ever present conscious- 
ness that one may do or omit to do. Neither good nor 
evil can have place in a moral sense in an eternal suc- 
cession of causes and effects wherein effect is contained 
in cause — wherein effect is the equivalent of cause, since 
that necessarily excludes volition. 

Endowed with the power of self-control, self-devel- 
opment, one can see that there is motive, design, pur- 
pose, in his being; that his existence as he is, and as he 
is capable of becoming, is entirely consistent with the 
idea of a universal provident cosmic scheme of law in 
which there are no special providential interferences, no 
specific creative acts performed. 

It is by the power of the will, the freedom of action 
in resisting temptation to do wrong, and in overcoming 
the sluggard sense of ease and the selfish feeling to 
prefer ones own interest at the cost, or to the injury, 
of others, that moral growth and sound character is 
promoted and is possible. 

To the highly developed moral self-consciousness, 
there is no evil but sin. All else that mars the happi- 
ness of mankind is misfortune. The one man can avoid, 
whether difficult or not depends on the degree of moral 
enlightenment and force of will, and so responsibility 
cannot be avoided. The other, for the most part, he 
cannot avoid with his present limitations and attended 
as he is by physical conditions which he cannot control. 
Volitional selection has taken the place of evolution by 
natural selection. Free will sits enthroned in the realm 
of mind and morals; a realm whose laws were not en- 
acted by human legislators, and whose sanctions cannot 
be enforced by human tribunals. 

As to most events occurring in individual experiences, 
the daily routine of life, the constant recurrence of the 



84 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

same, or like experiences crystalize into habit, and a sort 
of secondary or unconscious automatism is acquired. 
Thus a man by repeated criminality may acquire the 
habit of doing wrong without reflection ; without pausing 
to weigh and consider the probabilities for and against 
success, or of evading detection, he may get into a groove 
of wicked doing. He may acquire the crime habit. This 
is the unreflecting determining influence of formed char- 
acter — influence without the consciousness of restraint. 
And were it not for the fact that he may choose to 
pursue a different course, that he may exert the power 
to leave off committing crime as was remarkably demon- 
strated in the case of Jerry McAuley, the founder of 
the Jerry McAuley mission in New York, and many 
other instances of the most hardened criminals, he 
would be irresponsible. And thus also the moral man, 
the good man, by the long practice of virtuous thinking, 
and correct doing, may acquire the habit of behaving 
himself, may acquire the habit of morality; and not un- 
til some important emergency arises calling for the con- 
scious exercise of the moral judgment, when temptation 
is presented to deviate from the beaten path of moral 
rectitude, is there occasion for the decided exercise of 
volition. Then he will know that he can do the one 
thing or the other. Then he will know that the ego that 
holds the fortress of the inner life, may surrender, or 
sturdily stand for honor and virtuous conduct. It is 
in the higher region of intellectual and moral life, espe- 
cially the latter, where the strong tests of moral charac- 
ter are applied. Here the exercise of volition is a moral 
first cause, originating in the moral judgment. The multi- 
tudes of incidents and experiences favorable to the 
formation of good character, and the protracted habit 
of moral doing cannot be considered as proximate 



FREEDOM OF THE WILL 85 

causes of the volitional act. These go to the formation of 
a sound moral constitution. They go to impart fiber 
and strength to the moral judgment, just as good habits 
and good sanitary conditions impart strength and power 
of resistance to the physical constitution and afford gen- 
eral protection against the causes of disease. 

Here the negationist would interpose the objection that 
this is determinism. Haeckel in his "Last Words on 
Evolution," says: "Modern physiology shows clearly 
that the will is never really free in man or in the animal, 
but determined by the organization of the brain; this in 
turn is its individual character by the laws of heredity 
and the influence of the environment." Dr. Paul Du 
Bois, the eminent Professor of Neuropathology in the 
University of Berne, in his book on "The Psychic Treat- 
ment of Nervous Disorders" thus defines determinism: 
"The hypothesis of determinism includes neither reflec- 
tion,^ nor conversion, nor development." "If we choose, 
resist, or yield, it is apparent that we are impelled to do 
so either by the motive tendencies of sensation or by 
intellectual motives. We always yield, then, to an at- 
traction or repulsion. It is the liberty of a piece of iron 
attracted by a magnet." "Analyze any particular action, 
either the devotion of a martyr or the most shocking 
crime, and you will always find an imperious motor im- 
pulse which has determined the action." The author 
quotes with approval what a "Philosophic physician, 
Professor Flournoy" says in his "Metaphysics and Psy- 
chology": "It seems to me a desperate undertaking to 
preserve liberty in the face of a principle that is as 
definite as that of concomitance, and that is what it 
amounts to if experimental psychology is the expression 
of truth itself. . . . the succession of conscious 
states from the cradle to the tomb is necessarily also 



86 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

regulated, and as inevitable in each of its terms as the 
corresponding series of mechanical events." . . . "To 
explain a fact is always to place it among others where 
it implicitly belongs, and in virtue of which it could 
neither not exist nor be otherwise. The fundamental 
axiom of all science is that of absolute determinism. 
Science ends where liberty begins." Professor Huxley 
says : "The feeling we call volition is not the cause of 
the voluntary act, but the symbol of that state of the 
brain which is the immediate cause of the act. We are 
conscious automata." This is believed to be a fair state- 
ment of the position of all determinists. 

It is true that Professor Du Bois seems to qualify his 
fatalism by saying: "One also forgets that the fatality 
which is inevitably connected with the committed act 
does not predetermine any of the impulsions which are 
to follow" i.e. if a man commits a wicked act that does 
not necessarily "predetermine" him to a course of 
wickedness. But this does not in fact amount to a 
qualification. The fatality of the hypothesis remains; 
for according to the hypothesis, at the moment when one 
is about to perform an act, let it be never so revolting 
and wicked, the imperious motor impulse compels the 
completion of the act. There can be no recoiling with 
horror at the apprehension of the consequences of the 
act. When too late, i.e. after the act, whether by the 
imperious "motor tendencies of sensation" of remorse, 
or by the imperious "motor tendencies" of intellectual 
motives, a reformed life may be entered upon. But all 
the while volition is excluded. Conduct is the result of 
imperious motor impulse. 

The determinists make the mistake of regarding 
motive as cause, and conduct as effect in the sense that 
these terms are used and stand related to each other in 



FREEDOM OF THE WILL 87 

the various departments of science. Their moral code 
is "summed up in a collection of altruistic sentiments and 
ideas which are common to civilized people. Whether 
it is sentimental or rational in the beginning this morality 
little by little becomes instinctive and automatic. It con- 
stitutes what we call "moral consciousness/' "without 
doubt moral-consciousness is not absolute." (Du Bois.) 
Certainly not "absolute" in the sense that it can exist 
as an abstract principle in the absence of the relations 
of man with his fellows; but certainly "absolute" in the 
field of such relations. In the various departments of 
the social life it must always mean the same thing to all 
men or it is of no value. In these social states and re- 
lations right must always be governed by the same rules 
of righteousness, and wrong must always be wrong, else 
there can be no moral standard common to all men and 
which always means the same thing. The physiological 
origin of the moral sense and its "automatic" expres- 
sion in the daily life of man is the "automatic" morality 
of Herbert Spencer. 

Of course this "automatic" morality logically excludes 
moral responsibility with its necessary concomitant ac- 
countability, whatever the determinists may by their 
sophistical gymnatics attempt to show to the contrary. 
It is attended with no sanctions other than the organic 
penalties consequent upon departure from normal 
organic functions, and such sanctions as may from time 
to time prevail under varying social and legal conven- 
tions. There is no essential morality in a physiological 
function. There is no morality in the secretion of the 
liver. Nor can there be, if "altruistic sentiments" are 
the product of chemico-physiological processes occur- 
ring in the brain cells. Heredity may and does affect 
favorably or unfavorably the physical agencies of men- 



88 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

tality. The physical condition inherited may be such 
that the one may yield easily to evil sensual influences, 
or the other be able to resist the seductions of sensual 
gratifications. Physical conditions, as in animals, in- 
fluence the sensual life of man. Ideas, opinions, im- 
morality, crime habits are not heritable. Environment 
is owing to accidental conditions. 

If the mind or soul is a spiritual entity it cannot in 
itself be the subject of causes such as produce changes 
in the constitution of material objects, and cause patho- 
logical disorders and decay in organic matter. It can- 
not become diseased in any sense ever recognized in the 
physical organism. On the other hand, if mental mani- 
festations are merely phenomena, and are the product 
of chemico-physiological action, they are not substantive 
objects and cannot be the subjects of pathological con- 
ditions or causes. Mere phenomena cannot become aber- 
rant. In either case sensational impressions made by 
and through the organs of the physical senses produce 
mental reactions and emotions which affect favorably 
or unfavorably the physical organism. In no case can 
there be mind disease. 

But what is to be gained by speculating as to cause 
and effect? Even the determinist must feel that he is 
free to "change his mind" on the spur of the moment, 
even on the threshold of action. He often decides to 
do a thing and the next moment decides not to do it. 
Can any possible argument as to cause and effect do 
away with this feeling, or break the force of actual ex- 
perience? All motive is feeling. The beginning and 
course of mental activity in every individual life does 
not depend upon heredity except as influenced by physi- 
cal conditions which are heritable. Every human being 
has a mental individuality peculiar to himself. In every 



FREEDOM OF THE WILL 89 

case it is the beginning of a new psychical life, and sub- 
sequent development means "increasing psychical en- 
ergy." 

It has been well said that "we shall never have a 
higher test of truth than universal consent." Of course 
this refers to moral truths. And so the universal con- 
sciousness that we can choose between two or more 
courses of conduct ; in the consciousness that when two or 
more motives of action are presented to the mind we may 
elect to pursue the one and reject the other without be- 
ing conscious of restraint other than the exercise of our 
moral judgment; that we may reject the one that prom- 
ises the greatest temporal good or pleasure to ourselves, 
and elect to pursue that course which promises the good 
or happiness of others, and which even involves sacri- 
fice on our part, it must be taken that there can be no 
higher evidence that there is something within us not 
subject to the unvarying laws which govern matter — 
something indeed which can and often does effect and 
control the functions of animal life, not only in our- 
selves, but in others. 

What is asserted of the foreknowledge of God by 
dogmatic theologues, and formulated in sectarian creeds, 
has been taken by many to be inconsistent with the 
doctrine of free will and has long been a source of bitter 
strife and contention not only among many embracing 
the Christian faith, but has, no doubt, promoted sceptic- 
ism and even ribald satire and scoffing among those out- 
side the pale of the church. It must be conceded that 
to the finite mind of man this is a knotty problem. That 
God is omniscient, and at the same time omnipotent is 
universally believed by those who believe in his exist- 
ence. 

And it is difficult to resist the conclusion that, 



90 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

foreseeing evil, and possessing the power to prevent it, 
he is the author of evil. 

Resting here, as containing all the elements of the 
problem, man cannot be held responsible for evil, and 
penalties for evil deeds cannot be maintained to be just. 
It would be barely admissible to hold that restraints 
might be imposed upon the dangerously automatic crim- 
inal as a matter of safety to society. But why even 
that? Upon the hypothesis that man is not free, and 
that there are no sanctions other than human, Goldwin 
Smith has forcibly said: "One man is a lamb by nature, 
and another a tiger. Why is not the tiger as well as the 
lamb to follow his nature as long as the law will let him 
or he has the power." No one thinks of holding the 
tiger morally responsible for destroying other animals 
and man, to gratify its appetite for blood ; on what plane 
of moral responsibility above the animal can the tiger- 
man be placed if the entire race of man is to die and rot 
as the tiger with no sanctions beyond the grave ? Indeed 
consistently following out to its brutal result, the logic 
of his "Riddle," Haeckel avers that "the uneducated man 
and the savage are just as little 'rational' as our nearest 
relatives among the mammals (apes, dogs, elephants, 
etc.)" 

Much perplexity concerning God, and freedom, and 
immortality, comes of finite man assuming and presum- 
ing to make God in the image of man, and to measure 
the extent of his attributes, thoughts, loves, and even 
his wrath, and his hates, of which we read in the ancient 
literature of the Hebrews, which has had such control- 
ling, and, to a considerable extent, baneful influence 
upon what is termed Christian civilization. This much 
seems clear, that if God has all knowledge, past, present, 
and future, and is omnipotent, he could have caused 



FREEDOM OF THE WILL 91 

man to come into existence uninfluenced as to his mental 
and moral nature by his foreknowledge. It is also clear, 
that man could not have developed mentally and morally 
by virtue of any resource within himself, nor could he 
choose between right and wrong, nor believe that any- 
thing he might think or do to be essentially morally 
wrong, if, according to the natural law of his being in- 
tellectual and moral as well as physical, there were no 
such distinctions ; if according to such law there were no 
such states of his being as freedom and immortality. 
Man being the natural product of eternal, unthinking, 
unreasoning "iron law," could have no thought, nor per- 
form any act in contravention of that "iron law." 

According to the Hebraic legend God constantly in- 
terferes in human affairs and controls not only the des- 
tiny of nations, but influences the lives of individuals, 
and so if we accept this legend as true, it must be be- 
lieved that God is the author of evil as well as good. 
And what must be the logical result of this belief? 
Really it discharges man of all moral responsibility. It 
drives good people to the extremity of illogically and 
sophistically undertaking to explain as consistent with 
moral freedom and responsibility occurrences in the life 
of man which cannot be so explained in terms of com- 
mon fairness and common sense. Neither good nor evil 
can exist in the abstract. Neither can exist independ- 
ently of the relations of mankind to each other. Good 
and evil are terms of comparison ; and if God is the per- 
fect being as he is commonly thought to be, evil is never 
present in his mind except as he has knowledge of the 
intents and conducts of man; and the only way that God 
could be the author of evil would be to create man with 
the disposition to do evil, which, of course, is unthinkable 
of a perfect Being. 



92 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 



XIII 

IS IMMORTALITY A DEAD ISSUE? 

An eminent man of science (Professor Osier, now of 
the University of Oxford) in a recent lecture in the Ing- 
ersoll Lectureship of Harvard, on "Science and Im- 
mortality," drew a pessimistic picture of the general and 
scientific mind concerning the future life. The follow- 
ing excerpts from his lecture taken somewhat out of their 
order pretty correctly give the drift of what he said: 
"Immortality, and all that it may mean is a dead issue 
in the great movements of the world." "Where among 
the educated and refined, much less among the masses, 
do we find any ardent desire for a future life ? It is not 
a subject for drawing-room conversation, and the man 
whose habit it is to button-hole his acquaintances and 
earnestly inquire after their souls, is shunned like the 
Ancient Mariner." "Modern psychological science dis- 
penses altogether with the soul." "The new psycholog- 
ists have ceased to think nobly of the soul, and even 
speak of it as a complete superfluity." "The preacher 
was right; in this matter man hath no preeminence over 
the beast — 'as the one dieth, so dieth the other.' " Is 
the "modern psychology" mentioned by the lecturer, the 
psychology of the colleges? If this be so we can well 
understand why it is that indifTerentism as to the future 
life, or agnosticism, and it may be atheism, are so pre- 



IS IMMORTALITY A DEAD ISSUE? 93 

valent in the higher institutions of learning. It is true 
that the eminent man of science near the last word, aim- 
lessly clutching at shadows says, "Some of you will 
wander through all phases," (of doubt) "to come at 
last, I trust, to the opinion of Cicero, who had rather be 
mistaken with Plato than be right with those who deny 
altogether the life after death; and this is my own cotp- 
fessio fidei." 

But is it true that the masses of men, and even the 
men of science are indifferent to the future life? Hux- 
ley, the typical agnostic and illustrious in the world of 
science, in 1883 wrote to his friend John Moreley in a 
mingled vein of pathos and humor : "it is a curious thing 
that I find my dislike to the thought of extinction in- 
creasing as I get older and nearer the goal. 

"It flashes across me at all sorts of times with a sort 
of horror that in 1900 I shall probably know no more 
of what is going on than I did in 1800. I had sooner 
be in hell a good deal — at any rate in one of the upper 
circles, where the climate and company are not too try- 
ing." 

The hopes, the ambitions, the vanities, the loves, the 
hates, the struggles for existence of the race, engross 
the fleeting years, and serve to divert from serious 
thought of death and another state of existence. Young 
and middle aged are prone to thing that death is far 
away. Even the old have a feeling that other years are 
still left to them. And so, what may lie beyond this 
life, for the most part occupies a subordinate place in 
the thoughts of men. But for all that, there come seri- 
ous pauses in the life of everyone when solemn thoughts 
of death and of possibilities beyong the grave whelm 
the soul with hope or dread. 

Surely the millions of money invested in buildings 



94 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

erected to the worship of God, and the institutions of 
learning devoted to Christian education, all over the 
earth, and the millions on millions of people in the vari- 
ous quarters of the globe who weekly assemble in reli- 
gious devotion, and the many millions of money yearly 
contributed to missions, go to make up one of the "great 
movements of the world." In fact, is human society 
in all nominally Christian lands nearly so much moved 
in any other direction, when the number of people in- 
terested, the influence upon social and domestic rela- 
tions, the making and execution of the laws, and the im- 
mense benevolences fostered by the Christian spirit are 
taken into consideration? All this springs out of the 
thought that there must be survival of the morally fit 
in another life. No other movement is so great, nor so 
constant, nor so aggressive as this aggregate of forces 
against the powers of evil. It is certain that belief in 
the immortality of the soul is the predominant factor 
in this prodigious movement, even though this be an 
age of scepticism. 



MORAL FACULTIES 95 



XIV 

THE DIFFERENTIATING MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL 
FACULTIES 

No faculty of the mind — the soul — so differentiates 
man and the lower animals as the moral faculty, the 
moral attribute of the soul — the power of exercising 
moral judgment. Since it seems to be true that there 
are no people wholly destitute of a sense of right and 
wrong, however perverted that sense may be, it would 
seem to follow that it must be true that this moral sense 
is a natural attribute of the human mind. It is true that 
this faculty, if it exists as a native, race-faculty, seems 
almost extinct in the lowest tribes. Even many of a 
much higher degree of development than the lowest, have 
grossly preverted notions of duty, and of what consti- 
tutes right and wrong in morals, even to the extent of 
regarding as meritorious, actions which in the estima- 
tion of the morally enlightened, are held to be atro- 
ciously immoral, or wicked. Nevertheless, long and 
varied experiences of mankind, especially Christian mis- 
sionaries, with tribes apparently the lowest in the scale 
of intelligence and morals, have demonstrated their 
capability of attaining a high degree of excellence. 

Mr. Kidd, in his "Social Evolution," has this to say of 
the aborigines of Australia: "The Australian native has 
been, by the common consent of the civilized world, 
placed intellectually almost at the bottom of the list 



96 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

of the existing races comprising the human family. He 
has been the zero from which anthropologists and eth- 
nologists have long reckoned our intellectual progress 
upward. His mental capacity has been universally ac- 
cepted as being of a very low order. Yet this despised 
member of the race, possessing usually no words in his 
native languages for numbers above three, whose mental 
capacity is reckoned degrees lower than the Demara, 
whom Mr. Galton compared disparagingly with his dog, 
exhibits under our eyes powers of mind that should 
cause us seriously to reflect before committing our- 
selves hastily to current theories as to the immense gulf 
between him and ourselves. It is somewhat startling, 
for instance, to read that in the state schools in the 
Australian Colonies, it has been observed that aboriginal 
children learn quite as easily and rapidly as children of 
European parents; and, lately, that for three consecu- 
tive years the aboriginal schools at Remahyack, in 
Victoria, stood highest of all the state schools of the 
colony in examination results, obtaining a hundred per 
cent., on marks." (Citing Rev. John Mathew on the 
Australian Aborigines. "Proceedings of the Royal 
Society of New South Wales/') 

Hon. John M. Creed, M. D., a man of great distinc- 
tion in Australia, writing of this native race in the "Inde- 
pendent" for June 29, 1905, says: "The blacks still run 
wild as a rule in their almost and quite naked state. 
Very few have had any opportunity whatever to absorb 
what was better than the worst qualities of the worst 
whites. With more experience and better facilities for 
judging from this view-point than most, I may be per- 
mitted to instance a few cases convincing me that the 
common notion is not quite true that 'they are only a 
fraction at most above the brute.' For example : 



MORAL FACULTIES 97 

"A black boy was about to be killed according to 
custom when his parents had lost their lives in battle 
up in the Blender Ker Ranges, when he was bought by 
a Scotch naturalist for half a crown and brought up in 
his family. He is now eighteen. He speaks as pure 
and grammatical English as any white man, or, with a 
keen sense of wit, he will drop into the broad Doric 
Scotch of his adopted father. He graduated very near 
the head in a class of two hundred and fifty boys in the 
public school and has since been employed in the draft- 
ing-room of one of the largest engineering and ship 
building establishments in Australia, where the head 
draftsman told me that he fully held his own with any 
boy of like education. He sketches with ususual ability 
and plays The Pipes on the chanter thoroughly enjoy- 
ing the fun when Scotch skippers asked his employers 
'where did you find that black Scotchman*? 

"A black baby, brought from the Bush and raised in 
a village in New South Wales is now about twenty, as- 
sisting the blacksmith of the place, who says that he is 
most efficient, showing more thought and tact and per- 
severance than the average white apprentice. 

"A little fellow twelve years old was taken from a 
native camp to carry mail at a station. A lady there be- 
came interested in him and at odd moments taught him 
to read and write. He saved his wages, took up land, 
bought stock and is now rated for taxes at $50,000. 
Wishing to interest him in the ethnological studies of 
his race, I took him over the Australian Museum at 
Sidney, showing him the specimens of prehistoric imple- 
ments of Europe, comparing with those in use in remote 
parts of Australia. 

"After this, he said, one cannot avoid accepting evo- 
lution, can he ? And as we were leaving the Museum, he 



98 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

said: The Whites need not be so conceited, for their 
ancestors were pretty much like mine, were they not?' 

"I listened to a full-blooded black the other day, ad- 
dressing a crowd of whites in better English than most 
of them could have spoken, on the culpable extravagance 
of the State Government." 

The experiences of Rev. Dr. John G. Paton, in the 
New Hebrides, as recorded in his remarkable "Auto- 
biography" afford striking instances of what can be made 
of the lowest tribes. When he went to the New Hebrides 
some fifty years ago, he found the natives naked, and 
cannibals. The first missionaries who had landed on the 
island of Erromanga were immediately killed and eaten. 
Their natural barbarism was intensified by the more 
fertile resources in savage cruelty of the white traders 
who came to the islands to trade in sandal wood and 
slaves. 

Now the entire population of Erromanga and 
some of the other islands have become civilized and 
Christian. Naswai, a chief of the island of Aniwa, ad- 
dressing a delegation from the island of Fotuna, who 
had come to see what the missionaries were doing, said, 
among other things: "As heathens we quarreled, killed 
and ate each other." When asked to explain Chris- 
tianity, he said, what could have not been better said by 
anyone, "Tell them that a man must live as a Christian 
before he can show what Christianity is." In all that 
fair region of the globe, where not so many years ago it 
could be said, "And only man is vile," no negationist 
was ready to take the chances of being killed and eaten 
in the cause of "secular morals." At home the nega- 
tionists were talking about "ghost religions" and "an- 
cestor worship" from which as they contended then as 
now, these devoted missionaries derived the religion 



MORAL FACULTIES 99 

which impelled them to make their noble and perilous 
sacrifices. 

In America there are well authenticated instances of 
female infants of white parents being captured by In- 
dians who have grown up to womanhood confirmed in 
the habits of Indian life; have become wives of Indians, 
and on being discovered by white relatives have pre- 
ferred to remain in their savage associations. On the 
other hand many Indians becoming educated at Carlisle 
and Hampton and the Haskell Institute, have attained a 
high degree of intellectual and moral culture. And now 
that the territory of the Creeks, Cherokees, Choctaws, 
Chickasaws and Seminoles, have been incorporated with 
Oklohama into a new state of the Union, there are many 
members of these tribes who are qualified by education 
and native ability to become legislators, judges, govern- 
ors and members of Congress, and they have proven 
their ability to succeed in business and professional life. 

The untutored savage may not think of conduct or 
motive, the inward impulse to perform an act beneficial 
to others, or to perform an act injurious to others, as 
moral or immoral. Indeed he may feel the highest grati- 
fication in inflicting injury on those to whom he is hos- 
tile, and may consider such conduct highly meritorious. 
Nevertheless he must be regarded as possessing, rudi- 
mental as it is, the faculty of moral sense, the capacity 
to develop morally, and to come to know what is in- 
trinsically morally right from what is intrinsically mor- 
ally wrong. 

The culture of progenitors is not transmitted by in- 
heritance. Even the superior physical and mental traits 
of immediate progenitors are not uniformly so trans- 
mitted. It seems to be the rule that the rare prodigies 
of genius who have marked the highest possibilities of 



100 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

the human mind, have sprung from lives of the common 
place, occasionally from dullards, as witness the case of 
Newton. Now and then there are families from which, 
either in the male or female line, the prepotency of 
talented ancestors have prevailed for several genera- 
tions; but this only in native capacity to acquire or per- 
form under favoring conditions. It may be true that the 
native capacity of civilized mankind to receive intellect- 
ual and moral impressions from the external world by 
means of advantageous modifications of nerve and brain 
has been increased by long ages of accumulation and 
transmission of experiences by heredity, and that there 
has been a corresponding increase of mental power to 
co-ordinate, and to subjectively rationalize upon what is 
thus received, as also increased power of spontaneous 
subjective thought and reflection. 

But no matter how great the increased mental capa- 
city of the race, nor how much the contribution of each 
succeeding generation to the general fund of knowledge, 
the individual members of the most enlightened society 
like the savage, must begin at the bottom. Society ad- 
vances from age to age, the individual dies. The in- 
dividual comes into the world as ignorant, and more help- 
less than the newly born of the higher mammalia. By 
virtue of the mentality inherited contemporaneously with 
the physical, the individual may rapidly develop into the 
marvelous personality and intellectuality of a Newton, a 
Washington, a Lincoln. The Newton, the Washington, 
the Lincoln dies, and their mighty thoughts, the ex- 
ample of their mighty deeds, are contributed to the gen- 
eral fund of the ages, and mankind is the wiser and the 
better for their having lived. The genius of a Newton, 
and of the few who have signally marked the epochs of 
thought which have changed and directed into new cur- 



MORAL FACULTIES 101 

rents great movements of mankind, may be a "sport," 
as said of Newton by Professor Huxley in a letter to 
Mr. Kingsley in 1863, and, it seems not heritable by 
personal descendants, but the products of genius are in- 
herited by the race and thus the race advances. 

The rapid development of the individual fortunately 
born to the environment of society highly advanced in 
all that constitutes the best of modern civilization, is 
due, as Maudsley puts it, in the first place, to "the rich 
inheritance of other men's labor, . . . and, secondly 
the vast amount of human labor and experience which 
is concentrated in what we call education — that is, in 
the means and appliances brought to bear even on the 
humblest child; for these means and appliances repre- 
sent the accumulated acquisition of ages of human 
struggle." 

Emotion as distinguished from sensation, and the 
moral judgment as distinguished from the purely in- 
tellectual, are the controlling elements or factors in the 
moral life, and so, a high degree of moral living is com- 
patible with low development of the intellectual faculty. 
High intelligence is often associated in the same individ- 
ual with a very low sense of moral obligation. 

It is a melancholy fact that notwithstanding the 
Enropean nations, commonly termed Christian, were the 
inheritors of the Greek and Roman culture, and not- 
withstanding the fact that they have had in hand for 
centuries the New Testament of "good will toward men" 
and "on earth, peace," they, not so long ago so far re< 
verted to barbarism that they excelled the aboriginal 
tribes in ingenious devices of cruelty inflicted on people, 
not for bad conduct, but for mere dissent from tenets 
decreed by Councils sacriligiously assuming to speak for, 
and in the stead of God. In the endeavor to enforce 



102 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

these tenets, provinces were desolated, cities were 
sacked, prisoners were slaughtered, women were rav- 
ished, the brains of babes were knocked out against 
stone walls. And even in our own times, the lower 
moral stratum of civilization, whether of high or low 
social position in popular estimation, is so persistent in 
tendency to fraud and crime, whether under guise and 
cloak of corporate combinaton or individual fraud and 
felony; so engrossed with the acquisition of things ma- 
terial and showy, to the neglect of personal service to 
the needy and suffering, that it may be said that the 
moral margin in favor of this sort of civilization, as 
against the morality of the aboriginal tribes, may not be 
so wide as is fondly supposed. 

Amid the physical changes and convulsions which 
have been transpiring on the earth, and the infinite varie- 
ties and multitudes of species of animals and plants which 
have come and gone since the advent of man, the physi- 
cal man has remained essentially the same. (Huxley's 
"Man's Place in Nature," Appleton edition 209.) While 
this is to be said of his physical frame, comparing mil- 
leniums with milleniums, it is to be noted that there has 
been a gradual progressive development of the intel- 
lectual and moral attributes of his mental nature. This 
would seem to be owing to the fact that evolution, 
whether mainly by external causes according to the Dar- 
winian theory, or by internal causes according to the 
theory of mutation, ceased to be a physical factor in the 
case of man, except so far as external conditions have 
served to produce racial differences and characteristics, 
when he became erect and self-conscious, and the devel- 
opment of his mentality came to be volitional, depending 
mainly in his earliest career on the earth upon his physi- 
cal necessities and primitive preferences, and gradually 



MORAL FACULTIES 103 

increasing moral sense. Instead of being controlled 
automatically by the blind forces of nature, he had ar- 
rived at a period when by his mental attributes he became 
able to guide these mechanical forces in such manner as 
he conceived would make them serve his conscious pur- 
poses. 

To say of the moral sense that it originated in ani- 
mals lower than man by natural selection, or by the sur- 
vival of the fittest is to attribute its origin and develop- 
ment up to man, wholly to physical causes. Evolution 
by natural selection, or by survival of the fittest, is a 
destructive process. It means that progressive develop- 
ment could only be made by the death of the physically 
unfit. Moral unfitness in the animal had no part in the 
process. It is a remarkable proposition that the moral 
sense and moral development could take place mainly 
or only through the destruction or death of those physi- 
cally unfit to survive the adverse conditions of environ- 
ment. 

While it is inconceivable that man's mentality, with 
its distinctive intellectual and moral attributes could 
originate in physical causes, it is true that its develop- 
ment and activities are largely conditioned and limited 
by the physical. Hence the place and office of physio- 
logical psychology in the estimation of even the devout 
believer in soul personality and immortality. It is also, 
true that his moral nature is to a great extent condi- 
tioned and limited by his intellectual attributes. The 
moral sense is constantly subject to direction and often 
perverted in its judgments by the intellectual and by 
the physical conditions. The history of what is termed 
Christian Civilization during some 1600 or 1700 years 
of this era, affords a fearful illustration of the fact that 
a lively moral sense may be so perverted in its judgments 



104 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

by metaphysical dogmas that the strongest and tender- 
est ties of the human heart may be torn assunder in 
obedience to the demands of a morbid and distorted 
sense of duty brought about by metaphysical dogmatism. 
During the whole recorded history of man there has been 
no period when the moral sense was so keenly sensitive, 
and yet so false and cruel in its judgments and activities 
as during these dark and bloody centuries. And all be- 
cause of metaphysical distinctions and dogmas concern- 
ing the unknown and unknowable, having no essential 
relevancy to the moral life. Religion was made the in- 
strument of what, in effect, was never more immoral and 
wicked. 



THE MORAL SENSE 105 



XV 

THE MORAL SENSE, AND IMMORTALITY 

The propositions in the nature of postulates upon which 
the contention is based that the moral sense is the best 
evidence according to natural reason of the existence of 
soul personality and immortality, may be briefly sum- 
marized as follows: 

(1) The moral sense is that feeling which finds ex- 
pression in duty or beneficent' offices performed toward 
others, for aside from the relation of man with his 
fellow man, and the good will to perform such duties or 
beneficent offices as occasion may offer, moral obliga- 
tions possess no force or value. The sense of moral 
duty cannot exist aside from such relation. 

(2) Man cannot impose moral duties or moral obli- 
gations upon himself nor upon others which it would be 
intrinsically immoral to disregard. 

(3) Neither domestic, relations, nor society as known 
to civilized man, can exist without this sense of duty or 
moral obligation and the good will to perform them. 

(4) There can be no moral obligation of any force 
or value without sanctions of some kind or other. 

(5) Man cannot create tribunals qualified to take 
cognizance of motive and conduct intrinsically moral or 
immoral with power to enforce sanctions ; nor can public 
opinion justly enforce moral sanctions, for the reason 



106 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

that it has no means of ascertaining and correctly esti- 
mating motive. 

(6) It therefore follows that moral obligations can- 
not be unerringly determined, nor sanctions unerringly 
adjusted in this life, and that this can only be done by 
some one having the requisite knowledge of motive and 
the power to enforce sanctions, and since no one in this 
life can possibly possess the requisite knowledge and 
power, it must be in another life or not at all ; and with- 
out this it would be a matter of indifference so far as 
man's destiny is concerned, whether he lead a moral or 
an evil life. 

The whole current of history shows that disregard of 
what the best of earth regard as moral duties have not, 
in the long run, been successful in social or national life, 
and that the uplift of the race has ever been associated 
with causes morally right. 

"The wages of sin is death." 

This does not require it to be believed that God is 
constantly interfering in, and proximately controlling, 
the affairs of mankind. The slow and inconstant effect 
of moral influences do not encourage that belief. On the 
contrary it shows that progressive moral development is 
in accordance with a reign of government by universal 
cosmic law conditioned, hindered, and delayed in indi- 
vidual life by varied environment and by the volition 
and intellectuality which makes man capable of develop- 
ment and a morally responsible being. It does show 
that the universal moral sense is gradually raising the 
moral level of man. 

There must be an all prevading invincible purpose run- 
ning through all the ages of man, which the moral sense 
serves in the life of the race and which in its enlighten- 
ment leads to correct judgments of what is intrinsically 



THE MORAL SENSE 107 

right in morals or intrinsically wrong. How is this to 
be fairly inferred? And whence its source? Age upon 
age these queries are propounded. Age upon age natural 
reason has attempted the answer. Aside from purported 
special revelation, which not even a moity of the most 
enlightened of the race admit to be of any value, can a 
satisfactory answer be rendered except upon the assump- 
tion of the moral sense as a natural, intuitive attribute of 
the soul personality. That much abused term conscience 
is an uncertain and misleading guide to moral conduct — 
quite as apt to go wrong as to go right. The term may be 
well enough when it stands for an enlightened sense of 
right and wrong; but in popular parlance it is so am- 
biguous in meaning, so various in its estimates of moral 
conduct; so much a matter of merely individual senti- 
ment and feeling, often misplaced; so often a false or 
exaggerated estimate of the moral value of an unreflect- 
ing impulse, or emotional act, beneficial though it may 
be in result; so much a matter of environment, that the 
term is misleading and perhaps it would be better if it 
were altogether discarded from ethical literature, cer- 
tainly as a test of essential morality — certainly as a safe 
guide to moral conduct. Even in ethical literature it is 
the subject of various definitions. Professor Hyslop in 
his "Elements of Ethics," has a sub-title on the "Current 
and other Meanings of the Term" under which he 
briefly summarizes the definitions of Bishop Butler, 
Dugald Stewart, Schopenhaur, Martineau and Dorner, 
no two exactly alike. He gives Dorner's definition thus : 
"Conscience is a knowledge of moral good and combines 
the functions of a cognitive, and a legislative, and a 
judicial power," This definition, or any one given, is 
well enough if it always meant the same thing in prac- 
tical life. Or if it had not been made a pretext for some 



108 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

■ 
of the greatest atrocities in history; or if to this day, it 
had not been found to mean intolerance and condemna- 
tion upon grounds not at all involving essential right or 
wrong. 

The Apostle Paul, in his speech before Agrippa, said, 
"I verily thought with myself that I ought to do many 
things contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth." 

Rev. Dr. George Adam Smith, in his Yale lectures, 
quotes from a letter of the eminent and pure-minded 
Cardinal Newman, of the date of April 4, 1875, in which 
he refers to the Mosaic law concerning idolatry, blas- 
phemy, and witchcraft, and St. Paul's transferring of 
the sword of the Christian magistrates, as authority for 
holding that the persecution of the Inquisition and the 
massacre of St. Bartholomew were not unjust, though 
not justifying the cruelty. It was, no doubt, the con- 
science of the Cardinal, trained in a particular direction 
which led him to apologize for what a conscience less 
influenced by Mosaic dogmatism regards as unspeakable 
atrocities. 

A case of conscience involving greater atrocity be- 
cause of greated enlightenment, was that of Jael, who, 
by unsurpassed treachery, induced Sisera to come into 
her tent under pretense of concealment from his enemies, 
and driving a tent-pin through his temples while he slept. 
For this act of treachery, the Song of Deborah and 
Barak, recorded in the book of Judges, represents the 
angel of Jehovah as calling Jael "blessed above women." 



AND THE MORAL LAW 109 



XVI 



AND THE MORAL LAW — WHAT IT MEANS 



It is here not out of place to insist that that form of 
civilization termed Christian civilization, widely as many 
think Christianity has departed from its original sim- 
plicity as set out in the New Testament, has proven to be 
a mighty instrumentality in developing the native intel- 
lectual and moral capacity of heathen tribes and in recti- 
fying the moral judgment of many people who deem 
themselves civilized. 

Whether or no Jesus was the incarnation of a Divine 
spirit, his mission was divine, and on any hypothesis of 
superior spiritual existences — and the doctrine of the 
immortality of the soul must include that probability — 
his coming was the advent of a character of spiritual 
elevation and incisive reforming force, unparalleled in 
the history of the race. And the era which has fol- 
lowed has been signalized by the greatest convulsions 
and revolutions, both moral and political, growing out 
of his advent, known to history. 

At the time he came, the lofty conceptions had of 
Jehovah by the ancient Patriarchs, Prophets, and Psalm- 
ists, and the awful sense which prevailed of his presence 
and direction in the affairs of the Jewish people, had 
spent its force; and the Jewish religion had degenerated 



110 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

into a mechanical formalism. Many, if not most, of his 
first disciples, being Jews, and retaining the Jewish no- 
tion of superiority to surrounding nations, believing 
Christ to be the Messiah who was to deliver them from 
the Roman yoke, and "restore again the kingdom to 
Israel," and perhaps establish himself on the throne of 
David, had in view more of national, and even personal 
advantage, than faith in the ressurection and a blessed 
future state of existence. Obliged to submit to the politi- 
cal dominance of tetrarchs and satraps of Roman ap- 
pointment, they still retained their allegiance as a dis- 
tinctive people or nationality to the rule in temple and 
synagogue of priests and elders, and found it difficult to 
break away from ceremonials to which all their lives 
they had been accustomed. They carried over much of 
this Judaism into the new religious societies. They 
even sought to impose the right of circumcision on the 
gentile disciples. And thus at an early period there 
grew up a body of priests and prelates under the Chris- 
tian dispensation, arrogating to themselves sacerdotal 
privileges and functions. Ecclesiastical princes, pur- 
porting to wield celestial authority, declared dogmas and 
creeds, and denounced anathemas not found in the Gos- 
pels, nor in the Epistles of the Apostles, all drifting to- 
ward and ending in the sacerdotal thraldom of kings and 
peoples, and the terrors and horrors of faggot and sword 
for dissentients. 

It is true that the worst features of theological, and 
political sacerdotalism have passed away. But with what 
remains, and the long and bitter sectarian dissensions 
and separations about forms, and ceremonials and dogmas 
which do not involve character, dating back to the days 
of Luther and Calvin, now being happily toned down, 
social and educational reforms, and moral progress have 



ATSFD THE MORAL LAW 111 

been retarded. Nevertheless, while in the judgment of 
many competent observers, there is going on a gradual 
and widespread reaction in Europe and America, not 
only against dogma, but also against the sacred validity 
of the Bible and the supernatural divinity of Christ, and, 
as many believe, consequent loss of faith of a future 
life, the residual result is that, as a consequence of Jesus 
Christ having lived and left his plain and simple ministry 
to all ages, humanity has been raised to a higher moral 
plane with a more hopeful outlook for the future than 
in all the past. Certainly it cannot be questioned that 
the institution of the Christian system was an immense 
moral uplift out of what was left of the philosophical 
morality of aesthetic paganism and the effete formalism 
of Judaic theocracy which prevailed at the time of the 
advent of its founder. And it cannot be too much em- 
phasized that it is to the hope of eternal life that is due 
the immense influence it has had in the affairs of the 
world, and will no doubt prolong it as a moral force in 
all the earthly career of man. 

If then, it may reasonably be contended that the at- 
tribute of moral sense by which essential moral distinc- 
tions are, under favorable conditions, perceived and ap- 
proved, is native and intuitive in all men, it is important 
to ascertain if the moral law is susceptible of being so 
summarily and categorically formulated as to be at once 
commended and approved by the moral sense of even 
those of a low state of intellectual development. Were 
it not possible to conceive, or to formulate such funda- 
mental moral principle constituting a type or standard 
of moral values, there would be no criterion for guid- 
ance in the infinite details of the practical affairs of life 
calling for moral decision. Otherwise what is essen- 
tially morally right in any given instance would only 



112 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

be a matter of individual opinion or conscience, and in- 
finite moral confusion could not be avoided. In all the 
infinite and complex situations in which man is placed 
in his association with his fellowmen calling for discreet 
and right moral decision, were there no such typical 
principle as to what a man ought to do in a given moral 
situation, would be a matter to be decided from his own 
individual point of view, that variable and indefinite 
quality called conscience being his guide. As in criminal 
codes defining and fixing the punishment of murder it 
is not possible to set out in detail all the possible cir- 
cumstances which may excuse or mitigate the offense, 
so it would not be possible for the practical moral judg- 
ment in the absence of a typical moral guide to act at 
once and correctly as to the moral value of many an 
act or motive. 

The moral law is a social law. It is inconceivable ex- 
cept as a man owes duties to others. So far as we know 
it exists only for man. We know man as the only crea- 
ture endowed with the capacity of possibly becoming 
altogether righteous or holy. We know him as a being 
unrighteous, unholy, sinful. The system of Christian 
ethics, so simple as hardly to be called a system, so un- 
obscured by complex metaphysical definitions, so simply 
adapted to every degree of intelligence and condition of 
life, so marvelous in its potency to reform and build up 
character, that it seems destined to supplant all other 
systems, recognizes, with paramount emphasis, this char- 
acteristic social quality of the moral law. Christ in the 
parable of the good Samaritan enforces the universality 
of the obligation it imposes; and Paul also, as he stood 
"in the midst of Mars Hill," announced to the "men of 
Athens" that God had "made of one blood all nations of 
men for to dwell on the face of the earth." Duty to 



AND THE MORAL LAW 113 

ourselves, service to humanity, is its all pervading 
thought and requisite. The Great Teacher uttered the 
final summation of the Moral Law when he said, "All 
things therefore whatsoever ye would that men should 
do to you, do ye even so to them ; for this is the law and 
the prophets." This is a fundamental, concrete, categori- 
cal, formulation of the moral law. 

This is the Moral Law. 

This categorical formulation of the moral law, com- 
monly designated as the Golden Rule, has had universal 
recognition as the First Principle in morals, in all the 
most enlightened nations of antiquity and of the modern 
ages. 

Haeckel in his "Riddle" thus writes of it : "The Golden 
Rule is five hundred years older than Christ ; it was laid 
down as the highest moral principle by many Greek and 
oriental sages. Pittacus, of Mylene, one of the seven 
wise men of Greece, said six hundred and twenty years 
before Christ : 'Do not to thy neighbor that thou wouldst 
not suffer from him/ Confucius, the great Chinese 
philosopher and religious founder, (who rejected the 
idea of a personal God and the immortality of the soul) 
said five hundred years B. C. : 'Do to every man as thou 
wouldst have him do to thee ; and do not to another what 
thou wouldst not have him do to thee; this precept only 
dost thou need; it is the foundation of all other com- 
mandments/ " 

While Haeckel cites these historical facts for the pur- 
pose of discrediting Christ as an original and divinely 
inspired teacher, they are nevertheless of great value 
as tending to show that the cognition of this precept as 
a fundamental First Principle of morals is native to the 
human mind. The impertinent and irrelevant statement 
that Confucius did not believe in a personal God, nor in 



114 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

the immortality of the soul, possesses no value whatever 
as against these beliefs. It only appears that he had no 
idea of the true source of the Moral Law. 

Going further back still in his zeal to make a case 
against the preeminence of Christ as a moral teacher, 
Haeckel asserts ("Confession of Faith of a Man of 
Science") that the Golden Rule "had found place among 
the herds of Apes and other social Mammals . . . 
Brotherly love — mutual support, succor, protection, and 
the like — had already made its appearance among gre- 
garious animals as a social duty." (Monism.) The 
term "duty" is generally understood as referring to what 
is required by the moral law, and "implies a fundamental 
conception of morals; a conscious performance of a 
moral obligation imposed from within." In such sense 
the word duty as used by Haeckel is absurd. 

This First Principle is sufficiently comprehensive to 
indicate to individual man, as a member of organized 
society that, as Kant puts it, he "ought to act only in 
such a way as he could will that every one else should 
act under the same general conditions." The normal, 
universal moral judgment perceives that this is a maxim 
of morals which ought to universally prevail ; that indeed 
it is so all-sufficient for every moral situation and 
emergency that could possibly arise out of the relations 
of man with man, or man to societies of men, that every 
attempt to catalogue the duties that man owes to man, 
or to organized society, would only limit its universality 
and value. 

No elaboration of ethical theories could im- 
prove upon it, or extend its application. It is the c©n- 
erete expression of the supreme good. While there is 
a vast lower moral and intellectual stratum of mankind 
so much enthralled with mythologies ; so much engrossed 



AND THE MORAL LAW 115 

with material conditions; so much controlled by the in- 
stincts, impulses and appetites common to themselves 
and animals, that they do but little thinking, and have 
but imperfect notions of duty, it must be believed that 
the mind of universal man possesses the mental attri- 
bute to intuitively perceive the value and validity of this 
universal major maxim of morals when presented to it 
under favorable conditions. 

The universal and perfect recognition of the duties 
imposed by the Golden Rule, and universal conformity 
to it in practical life, is, of course, an ideal condition. 
And generally, it may be said, that the difficulties to be 
encountered in making it a practical and universal rule 
of moral conduct would seem, on first thought, to be 
insurmountable. The idiosyncracies of temperament, 
the differences in intellectual capacity; the injurious and 
seemingly invincible influences of individual environ- 
ment and heredity; mistakes of facts and errors of judg- 
ment upon facts, of the best intentioned people, the 
remedying of which conditions would seem to be im- 
possible, do not now enable us to see that the ideal will 
ever become the real. Kant indeed maintained, that 
perfect conformity to the moral law is impossible in this 
life, and that, since the "categorical imperative" — which 
is Kant's formulation of the Golden Rule — invincibly de- 
mands moral perfection, a future state of existence is 
a necessity in order to attain the ideal. In his Ethics 
he says: "Now the perfect accordance of the will with 
the moral law is holiness, a perfection of which no 
rational being of the sensible world is capable at any 
moment of his existence. Since, nevertheless, it is re- 
quired as practically necessary, it can only be found in a 
progress in infinitum towards that perfect accordance, 
and on principles of pure practical reason, it is necessary 



116 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

to assume such a practical progress as the real object 
of our will. 

"Now this endless progress is only possible on the 
supposition of an endless duration of the existence and 
personality of the same rational being (which is called 
the immortality of the soul). The sumum bonum, then, 
practically is only possible on the supposition of the im- 
mortality of the soul; consequently this immortality, be- 
ing inseparably connected with the moral law, is a postu- 
late of pure practical reason (by which I mean a theore- 
tical proposition, not demonstratable as such, but which 
is an inseparable result of an unconditional a priori prac- 
tical law)." 

"Hence also morality is not properly the doctrine how 
we should make ourselves happy, but how we should 
make ourselves become worthy of happiness." Profes- 
sor Sidgwick, in his "Methods of Ethics," says of Kant's 
maxim, "Act from a principle or maxim that you can 
will to be a universal law," that it threw the Golden Rule 
of the Gospel (Do unto others as ye would that others 
should do unto you) into a form that commended itself 
to my reason . . . "Whatever is right for me must 
be right for all persons in similar circumstances." 

The Golden Rule applies only in instances where 
fundamental principles of right and wrong are involved. 
It is common experience that men do unwise, indiscreet, 
impolitic things when their intentions are innocent, or at 
any rate not evil, when no principle of essential morals 
is involved, and to which it would be absurd or imper- 
tinent to apply the rule. And then its action cannot be 
invoked except when morally right that it should be. One 
confined in prison for crime cannot rightly ask that 
the officer having him in custody should discharge him 



AND THE MORAL LAW 117 

because he would like to be discharged in like situation. 
Mr. Huxley, in his "Evolution and Ethics," affords a 
typical instance of the misconception and abuse of in- 
terpretation of the Golden Rule; and it is a matter for 
surprise that so eminent and close a thinker should have 
put a construction upon it so out of joint with the con- 
text in which it appears, so foreign to the whole teach- 
ing of Christ and the whole tenor of the Gospels. Thus 
we read in the "Prolegomena" : "Strictly observed, the 
'Golden Rule' involves the negation of law by the refusal 
to put it in motion against law breakers; and, as re- 
gards the external relations of a polity, it is the refusal 
to continue the struggle for existence. It can be obeyed, 
even partially, only under the protection of a society 
which repudiates it. Without such shelter, the followers 
of the 'Golden Rule' may indulge in hopes of heaven, 
but they must reckon with the certainty that other people 
will be masters of the earth. 

"What would become of the garden if the gardener 
treated all the weeds and slugs and birds and trespassers 
as he would like to be treated, if he were in their place?" 
His outre misconception of the spirit of the Golden Rule 
is forcibly illustrated in his attributing to weeds and slugs 
a consciousness of injustice in its literal application. 
Reading the Golden Rule between the lines we read: 
"Therefore all things whatsoever ye" (rightfully — mor- 
ally — justly) "would that men should do to you, do ye 
even so to them." 

Notwithstanding the prediction of Kant as to the ulti- 
mate moral outcome of this "sensible world," age com- 
pared with age since the dawn of history of the races 
which have been counted as civilized, or as the progeni- 
tors of the civilized, has shown a steady moral uplift, 
interrupted to be sure, by long periods of lapse and dark- 



118 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

ness; and as enlightened man has reached the stage of 
intellectual and moral advancement when moral develop- 
ment and elevation are more than ever facilitated by the 
greater power to control environment and the evil 
tendencies of heredity, it seems reasonable to expect that 
in the long run of the ages, the ideal will become the real ; 
when men will attain to that perfect moral state predicted 
by Mr. Spencer as the result of ''accumulated experi- 
ences of utility" transmitted by heredity, when the 
"moral sentiments will guide just as spontaneously and 
adequately as now do the sensations/' though not as 
organic or phsiological morality. It will be a conscious, 
thoughtful moral condition of universal society. A time 
when "on earth peace, and good will toward men," tid- 
ings of which the shepherds heard in the air, will uni- 
versally prevail. Certainly no Christian believer is at 
liberty to profess doubt of this result. 

The moral law must be — as to the inner life certainly 
can only be — enforced by the individual moral judg- 
ment. It is true, as was anciently said, that "every man 
is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lust and 
enticed." This drawing away, this enticing comes from 
social and material conditions with which man is related. 
From the point of view of the religion of the New Testa- 
ment it is asserted, that the natural moral judgment is 
susceptible of being reinforced by the divine super- 
natural influence of the Holy Spirit. Be that as it may, 
the perception of the validity and value of the moral 
law must a priori obtain in the moral judgment. The 
apprehension of the moral law by the moral judgment 
goes before Christian faith and the supernatural refor- 
mation of the will. 

Whence comes this intuitive sense of the righteousness 
of the moral law ? Whence comes it that here is a moral 



AND THE MORAL LAW 1U 

tribunal from whose judgments there is no appeal, and 
which has no executive but itself? Did it begin in the 
division of the primordial proto-plasmic cell, as Profes- 
sor Drummond has said? Before the advent of man 
did it simply mean the attractiveness growing out of 
the differences is sex of animals, and the "altruism" 
growing out of the reproductive function? Did these 
biological processes constitute the tap-root out of which 
sprung the high moral sense of man? And then when 
the psycho-physical evolution was arrested in the highest 
animal next below man, leaving an abyss which anthro- 
pology has never been able to bridge over, how was the 
transmutation or mutation made? If not the result of 
the same evolutionary law which produced man's physical 
structure, as Mr. Wallace contends it was not; if there 
is nothing in fossil discoveries showing a gradual trans- 
ition of skull formation and brain developmnet of the 
animal to the skull formation and brain development of 
man, as Huxley is understood to contend that there is 
not; if in fact all the discoveries of science leave the 
abrupt disparity between the psychic of the highest ani- 
mal and the psychic of the lowest man wholly unac- 
counted for by ages of slow and gradual accretion as 
most evolutionists hold, then it must be accounted for 
upon some other theory. But when we take into con- 
sideration that it is a change to the intellectual and the 
moral with the capacity of indefinitely increasing de- 
velopment, it would seem absurd to say, that the cause 
of the change was an unintelligent cause. If an intel- 
ligent cause, it must necessarily have been of a degree 
infinitely higher than the intelligence of the most highly 
developed man. It must have been the act of an Intel- 
ligence and Power so inconceivably higher than man that 
with reference to man it was Omniscient and Omni- 



120 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

potent, in a word from God. It must have been the re- 
sult of conscious, specific design. However difficult it 
may be to support this contention affirmatively, cer- 
tainly it receives strong support in the impossibility that 
it should have been due to any other cause. 



CHARITY— LOVE— GOOD WILL 121 



XVII 

CHARITY — LOVE — GOOD WILL 

While the moral law is a social law, neither political 
societies, nor human organizations, assuming vicarious 
divine functions and authority, can a priori so formulate 
it in detail as to enact it, or express it in creeds, and only 
in the more flagrant instances of violation, enforce it by 
penalties. Assuming the existence of God, it is incon- 
ceivable that He would not be perfect beyond human 
conception of perfection; and it cannot be commended 
to universal reason that a perfect, infallible being would 
delegate to imperfect, fallible, perishable creatures the 
authority, to say nothing of ability, to search out motive 
and by human penalties purge the sources of evil con- 
duct. Temptations to do wrong come of social and ma- 
terial conditions and environments. The remedy must 
come from the individual moral judgment. Motive is 
the guiding, the controlling factor in the moral judgment. 
Kant in the opening sentence of his treatise on Ethics, 
forcibly says : "Nothing can possibly be conceived in the 
world, or even out of it, which can be called good with- 
out qualification, except a Good Will." And the Great- 
est of the Apostles, he of Tarsus, the great Jewish meta- 
physician, put it still more forcibly when he wrote to the 
Corinthians in these burning words: "Though I speak 
with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not 
charity, (i.e. love, i.e. good will) I am become as sound- 
ing brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 



122 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

"And though I have the gift of prophecy, and under- 
stand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I 
have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and 
have not charity, (i. e., love, i. e., good will) I am 
nothing. 

"And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, 
and though I give my body to be burned, and have not 
charity (i. e., love, i. e., good will), it profiteth me 
nothing. 

"Charity never faileth; but whether there be proph- 
ecies, they shall fail ; whether there be tongues, they shall 
cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish 
away." 

This charity — this love — does not mean affection for 
the person, as commonly understood. It means love for 
the performance of duty; a benevolence springing out 
of a desire to help an unfortunate, or even an unworthy 
fellow creature; a mingling of pity and sorrow for one 
morally deformed; a longing to lift a fellowman out of 
the morass of moral depravity. As Kant truly says: 
"For love, as an affection, cannot be commanded, but 
beneficence for duty's sake may; even though we are 
not impelled to it by any inclination — nay, are even re- 
pelled by a natural and unconquerable aversion. This 
is practical love, and not pathological — a love which is 
seated in the will, and not in the propensions of sense — 
in principles of action and not of tender sympathy; and 
it is this love alone which can be commanded. 



"It is in this manner, undoubtedly, that we are to un- 
derstand those passages of Scripture also in which we 
are commanded to love our neighbor, even our enemy." 



CHARITY— LOVE— GOOD WILL 123 

Now the fact that man does possess that attribute 
of the mind which we call the moral sense, the moral 
judgment when the moral sense is in active exercise, 
which passes upon motives as well as conduct; the fact 
that man does have cognition of the intrinsically moral 
and the intrinsically immoral; the fact, for instance, 
that man does regard murder as evincing inherently a 
high degree of moral depravity, are matters of enor- 
mous significance in that by means of this moral sense 
we are able to distinguish between the intrinsically moral 
and the intrinsically immoral, at the same time admon- 
ishing us that the regarding or disregarding its behests 
may possibly affect our status in another life. 



124 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 



XVIII 

THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION 

What is to be the future of science with reference to 
the prevalent religion of the most enlightened nations? 
And having exploded the theological dogmas largely due 
to Judaism, what will be the effect upon Christian faith 
if science shall also subvert belief in the miraculous 
which has so long been held to attest the divine origin 
of that system of faith? Would Christianity survive 
as a distinct religious system? 

The most potent factors in its propagation and identi- 
fication with the highest civilization are the transcendent 
personality of its founder and the strong reinforcement 
his religion has given to belief in the immortality of the 
soul — the strong assurance it has given that the morally 
fit will enjoy eternal life. No matter what shall become 
of the adventitious miraculous element, these pre-emi- 
nent factors will forever remain. Science certainly can- 
not do away with the fact of the perfect personality of 
Christ and his perpetually illuminating and inspiring ex- 
ample. Nor can it generally subvert faith in immortal- 
ity. That faith lies outside the domain of science. When 
it comes to the moral and the spiritual its methods are 
inept. When it enters that field, it abandons the privi- 
leges and the authority of the expert, and is open to the 
criticism of those who, though not learned in science, 
may yet be more logical, and freer from the limitations 
imposed by mechanical and demonstrative methods. The 



FUTURE OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION 125 

congenital moral sense cannot be eradicated out of the 
soul any more than the attribute of reason. It may 
be perverted as may any other mental attribute. The 
moral pre-eminence given to the Golden Rule by the 
perfect personality of Christ will be forever maintained. 
By that personality, it was made a distinguishing char- 
acteristic of his religion. All future generations will 
hear the gentle voice of the Christ proclaiming the Beati- 
tudes from the Mount. All generations will feel a re- 
sponsive sense of benevolence and affectionate approval 
on reading Paul's noble discourse on Charity — on broth- 
erly good will — on universal good will. There will be 
those in every generation who will thrill with exaltation 
— with exultation — on reading the triumphant words of 
the Greatest of the Apostles: "So when this corruptible 
shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have 
put on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying 
that is written, Death is swallowed up in Victory. 

"O death where is thy sting? O grave where is thy 
victory ?" 

And so multitudes in every generation will have place 
in their souls for the love of the inspired Nazarene, and 
will be solaced and cheered by the hope of eternal life. 

Here is embodied a religion which satisfies reason, 
and contains the solace that when the righteous shall 
lay down this corruption they will put on incorruption; 
a religion, the universal prevalence of which among the 
nations of the earth, would mean the decay of all the 
navies of the world at their docks, and the disarmament 
of all the armies. It would mean that nations would not 
"learn war any more." It would empty prisons. It 
would mean the abolition of the slums of the great cities, 
reeking with filth and pauperism, and beastliness and 
crime, while in a nearby street the Christless rich are 



126 IS THE LIFE OF MAN ETERNAL? 

wallowing and sweltering in luxuries they cannot con- 
sume, and maybe only leave to idle and worthless pro- 
geny. It would mean the kindly, considerate, brother- 
hood of employer and employee. It would mean that 
enlightened mankind would co-operate in lifting up all 
the barbarous and heathen peoples to the high level of 
universal and benevolent brotherhood. 

In that era, if it is to come, for which all good peo- 
ple hope and pray, of universal peace and "good will 
toward men," man will have the abiding consciousness 
that the "Categorical Imperative" — that is to say the 
Moral Law, concretely formulated in the Golden Rule — 
is a Revelation of God and Everlasting Life. 

"It must be so, — Plato, thou reasonest well ! — 
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, 

This longing after immortality? 
Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, 
Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul 
Back on herself? and startles at destruction? 

*T is the divinity that stirs within us; 
'Tis heaven itself that points out an hereafter, 

And intimates eternity to man." 

— Addison's tragedy of Cato. 



FINIS 



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